THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


THE  NOVELS  AND  TALES  OF 
HENRY  JAMES 


New  York  Edition 
VOLUME  XXIII 


THE 
GOLDEN    BOWL 

HENRY  JAMES 

VOLUME  I 


NEW   YORK 

CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S   SONS 
1922 


Copyright,  1904  and  1909-  by  Charles  Scribner's  Sons 


PREFACE 

AMONG  many  matters  thrown  into  relief  by  a  refreshed  ac 
quaintance  with  "  The  Golden  Bowl  "  what  perhaps  most 
stands  out  for  me  is  the  still  marked  inveteracy  of  a  certain 
indirect  and  oblique  view  of  my  presented  action ;  unless 
indeed  I  make  up  my  mind  to  call  this  mode  of  treatment, 
on  the  contrary,  any  superficial  appearance  notwithstand 
ing,  the  very  straightest  and  closest  possible.  I  have  already 
betrayed,  as  an  accepted  habit,  and  even  to  extravagance 
commented  on,  my  preference  for  dealing  with  my  subject- 
matter,  for  "  seeing  my  story,"  through  the  opportunity  and 
the  sensibility  of  some  more  or  less  detached,  some  not 
strictly  involved,  though  thoroughly  interested  and  intelli 
gent,  witness  or  reporter,  some  person  who  contributes  to 
the  case  mainly  a  certain  amount  of  criticism  and  interpre 
tation  of  it.  Again  and  again,  on  review,  the  shorter  things 
in  especial  that  I  have  gathered  into  this  Series  have  ranged 
themselves  not  as  my  own  impersonal  account  of  the  affair 
in  hand,  but  as  my  account  of  somebody's  impression  of  it 
—  the  terms  of  this  person's  access  to  it  and  estimate  of  it 
contributing  thus  by  some  fine  little  law  to  intensification 
of  interest.  The  somebody  is  often,  among  my  shorter  tales 
I  recognise,  but  an  unnamed,  unintroduced  and  (save  by 
right  of  intrinsic  wit)  unwarranted  participant,  the  imper 
sonal  author's  concrete  deputy  or  delegate,  a  convenient  sub 
stitute  or  apologist  for  the  creative  power  otherwise  so  veiled 
and  disembodied.  My  instinct  appears  repeatedly  to  have 
been  that  to  arrive  at  the  facts  retailed  and  the  figures  intro 
duced  by  the  given  help  of  some  other  conscious  and  con 
fessed  agent  is  essentially  to  find  the  whole  business  —  that 
is,  as  I  say,  its  effective  interest  —  enriched  by  the  way.  I 
have  in  other  words  constantly  inclined  to  the  idea  of  the 


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PREFACE 

particular  attaching  case  plus  some  near  individual  view  of 
it;  that  nearness  quite  having  thus  to  become  an  imagined 
observer's,  a  projected,  charmed  painter's  or  poet's  —  how 
ever  avowed  the  "  minor  "  quality  in  the  latter  —  close  and 
sensitive  contact  with  it.  Anything,  in  short,  I  now  reflect, 
must  always  have  seemed  to  me  better  —  better  for  the 
process  and  the  effect  of  representation,  my  irrepressible 
ideal  —  than  the  mere  muffled  majesty  of  irresponsible  "au 
thorship."  Beset  constantly  with  the  sense  that  the  painter 
of  the  picture  or  the  chanter  of  the  ballad  (whatever  we  may 
call  him)  can  never  be  responsible  enough,  and  for  every  inch 
of  his  surface  and  note  of  his  song,  I  track  my  uncontrol 
lable  footsteps,  right  and  left,  after  the  fact,  while  they  take 
their  quick  turn,  even  on  stealthiest  tiptoe,  toward  the  point 
of  view  that,  within  the  compass,  will  give  me  most  instead 
of  least  to  answer  for. 

I  am  aware  of  having  glanced  a  good  deal  already  in  the 
direction  of  this  embarrassed  truth — which  I  give  for  what 
it  is  worth  ;  but  I  feel  it  come  home  to  me  afresh  on  re 
cognising  that  the  manner  in  which  it  betrays  itself  may  be 
one  of  the  liveliest  sources  of  amusement  in  "The  Golden 
Bowl."  It  's  not  that  the  muffled  majesty  of  authorship 
does  n't  here  ostensibly  reign  ;  but  I  catch  myself  again  shak 
ing  it  off  and  disavowing  the  pretence  of  it  while  I  get  down 
into  the  arena  and  do  my  best  to  live  and  breathe  and  rub 
shoulders  and  converse  with  the  persons  engaged  in  the 
struggle  that  provides  for  the  others  in  the  circling  tiers  the 
entertainment  of  the  great  game.  There  is  no  other  parti 
cipant,  of  course,  than  each  of  the  real,  the  deeply  involved 
and  immersed  and  more  or  lass  bleeding  participants ;  but  I 
nevertheless  affect  myself  as  having  held  my  system  fast 
and  fondly,  with  one  hand  at  least,  by  the  manner  in  whict 
the  whole  thing  remains  subject  to  the  register,  ever  so  closelj 
kept,  of  the  consciousness  of  but  two  of  the  characters. 
The  Prince,  in  the  first  half  of  the  book,  virtually  sees  and 
knows  and  makes  out,  virtually  represents  to  himself  every 
thing  that  concerns  us  —  very  nearly  (though  he  doesn't 
speak  in  the  first  person)  after  the  fashion  of  other  reporters 

vi  • 


PREFACE 

and  critics  of  other  situations.  Having  a  consciousness 
highly  susceptible  of  registration,  he  thus  makes  us  see  the 
things  that  may  most  interest  us  reflected  in  it  as  in  the  clean 
glass  held  up  to  so  many  of  the  "short  stories"  of  our  long 
list ;  and  yet  after  all  never  a  whit  to  the  prejudice  of  his 
being  just  as  consistently  a  foredoomed,  entangled,  embar 
rassed  agent  in  the  general  imbroglio,  actor  in  the  offered 
play.  The  function  of  the  Princess,  in  the  remainder,  matches 
exactly  with  his ;  the  register  of  her  consciousness  is  as 
closely  kept  —  as  closely,  say,  not  only  as  his  own,  but  as 
that  (to  cite  examples)  either  of  the  intelligent  but  quite 
unindividualised  witness  of  the  destruction  of  "  The  Aspern 
Papers,"  or  of  the  all-noting  heroine  of  "The  Spoils  of 
Poynton,"  highly  individualised  though  highly  intelligent ;  the 
Princess,  in  fine,  in  addition  to  feeling  everything  she  has  to, 
and  to  playing  her  part  just  in  that  proportion,  duplicates, 
as  it  were,  her  value  and  becomes  a  compositional  resource, 
and  of  the  finest  order,  as  well  as  a  value  intrinsic.  So  it  is 
that  the  admirably-endowed  pair,  between  them,  as  I  retrace 
their  fortune  and  my  own  method,  point  again  for  me  the 
moral  of  the  endless  interest,  endless  worth  for  "  delight," 
of  the  compositional  contribution.  Their  chronicle  strikes 
me  as  quite  of  the  stuff  to  keep  us  from  forgetting  that  ab 
solutely  no  refinement  of  ingenuity  or  of  precaution  need  be 
dreamed  of  as  wasted  in  that  most  exquisite  of  all  good 
causes  the  appeal  to  variety,  the  appeal  to  incalculability, 
the  appeal  to  a  high  refinement  and  a  handsome  wholeness 
of  effect. 

There  are  other  things  I  might  remark  here,  despite  its 
perhaps  seeming  a  general  connexion  that  I  have  elsewhere 
sufficiently  shown  as  suggestive ;  but  I  have  other  matter 
in  hand  and  I  take  a  moment  only  to  meet  a  possible 
objection  — should  any  reader  be  so  far  solicitous  or  even 
attentive  —  to  what  I  have  just  said.  It  may  be  noted,  that 
is,  that  the  Prince,  in  the  volume  over  which  he  nominally 
presides,  is  represented  as  in  comprehensive  cognition  only 
of  those  aspects  as  to  which  Mrs.  Assingham  does  n't  func 
tionally  —  perhaps  all  too  officiously,  as  the  reader  may  some- 

vii 


PREFACE 

times  feel  it  —  supersede  him.  This  disparity  in  my  plan  is, 
however,  but  superficial ;  the  thing  abides  rigidly  by  its  law 
of  showing  Maggie  Verver  at  first  through  her  suitor's  and 
her  husband's  exhibitory  vision  of  her,  and  of  then  showing 
the  Prince,  with  at  least  an  equal  intensity,  through  his  wife's; 
the  advantage  thus  being  that  these  attributions  of  experi 
ence  display  the  sentient  subjects  themselves  at  the  same 
time  and  by  the  same  stroke  with  the  nearest  possible  ap 
proach  to  a  desirable  vividness.  It  is  the  Prince  who  opens 
the  door  to  half  our  light  upon  Maggie,  just  as  it  is  she  who 
opens  it  to  half  our  light  upon  himself;  the  rest  of  our 
impression,  in  either  case,  coming  straight  from  the  very 
motion  with  which  that  act  is  performed.  We  see  Charlotte 
also  at  first,  and  we  see  Adam  Verver,  let  alone  our  seeing 
Mrs.  Assingham,  and  every  one  and  every  thing  else,  but  as 
they  are  visible  in  the  Prince's  interest,  so  to  speak  —  by 
which  I  mean  of  course  in  the  interest  of  his  being  himself 
handed  over  to  us.  With  a  like  consistency  we  see  the  same 
persons  and  things  again  but  as  Maggie's  interest,  her  ex- 
hibitional  charm,  determines  the  view.  In  making  which 
remark,  with  its  apparently  so  limited  enumeration  of  my 
elements,  I  naturally  am  brought  up  against  the  fact  of  the 
fundamental  fewness  of  these  latter  —  of  the  fact  that  my 
large  demand  is  made  for  a  group  of  agents  who  may  be 
counted  on  the  fingers  of  one  hand.  We  see  very  few  per 
sons  in  "  The  Golden  Bowl,"  but  the  scheme  of  the  book, 
to  make  up  for  that,  is  that  we  shall  really  see  about  as  much 
of  them  as  a  coherent  literary  form  permits.  That  was  my 
problem,  so  to  speak,  and  my  gageure  —  to  play  the  small 
handful  of  values  really  for  all  they  were  worth  —  and  to 
work  my  system,  my  particular  propriety  of  appeal,  partic 
ular  degree  of  pressure  on  the  spring  of  interest,  for  all  that 
this  specific  ingenuity  itself  might  be.  To  have  a  scheme 
and  a  view  of  its  dignity  is  of  course  congruously  to  work  it 
out,  and  the  "amusement"  of  the  chronicle  in  question  — 
by  which,  once  more,  I  always  mean  the  gathered  cluster  of 
all  the  kinds  of  interest  —  was  exactly  to  see  what  a  con 
summate  application  of  such  sincerities  would  give. 

viii 


PREFACE 

So  much  for  some  only  of  the  suggestions  of  re-perusal 
here  —  since,  all  the  while,  I  feel  myself  awaited  by  a  pair 
of  appeals  really  more  pressing  than  either  of  those  just 
met;  a  minor  and  a  major  appeal,  as  I  may  call  them:  the 
former  of  which  I  take  first.  I  have  so  thoroughly  "gone 
into  "  things,  in  an  expository  way,  on  the  ground  covered 
by  this  collection  of  my  writings,  that  I  should  still  judge  it 
superficial  to  have  spoken  no  word  for  so  salient  a  feature 
of  our  Edition  as  the  couple  of  dozen  decorative  "  illustra 
tions."  This  series  of  frontispieces  contribute  less  to  orna 
ment,  I  recognise,  than  if  Mr.  Alvin  Langdon  Coburn's 
beautiful  photographs,  which  they  reproduce,  had  had  to  suf 
fer  less  reduction  ;  but  of  those  that  have  suffered  least  the 
beauty,  to  my  sense,  remains  great,  and  I  indulge  at  any  rate 
in  this  glance  at  our  general  intention  for  the  sake  of  the 
small  page  of  history  thereby  added  to  my  already  volumin 
ous,  yet  on  the  whole  so  unabashed,  memoranda.  I  should 
in  fact  be  tempted  here,  but  for  lack  of  space,  by  the  very 
question  itself  at  large  —  that  question  of  the  general  ac 
ceptability  of  illustration  coming  up  sooner  or  later,  in  these 
days,  for  the  author  of  any  text  putting  forward  illustrative 
claims  (that  is  producing  an  effect  of  illustration)  by  its  own 
intrinsic  virtue  and  so  finding  itself  elbowed,  on  that  ground, 
by  another  and  a  competitive  process.  The  essence  of  any 
representational  work  is  of  course  to  bristle  with  immediate 
images;  and  I,  for  one,  should  have  looked  much  askance 
at  the  proposal,  on  the  part  of  my  associates  in  the  whole 
business,  to  graft  or  "  grow,"  at  whatever  point,  a  picture 
by  another  hand  on  my  own  picture  —  this  being  always,  to 
my  sense,  a  lawless  incident.  Which  remark  reflects  heavily, 
of  course,  on  the  "  picture-book  "  quality  that  contempo 
rary  English  and  American  prose  appears  more  and  more 
destined,  by  the  conditions  of  publication,  to  consent,  how 
ever  grudgingly,  to  see  imputed  to  it.  But  a  moment's 
thought  points  the  moral  of  the  danger. 

Anything  that  relieves  responsible  prose  of  the  duty  of 
being,  while  placed  before  us, good  enough,  interesting  enough 
and,  if  the  question  be  of  picture,  pictorial  enough,  above 

ix 


PREFACE 

all  in  itself,  does  it  the  worst  of  services,  and  may  well  in 
spire  in  the  lover  of  literature  certain  lively  questions  as  to 
the  future  of  that  institution.  That  one  should,  as  an  author, 
reduce  one's  reader,  "  artistically  "  inclined,  to  such  a  state 
of  hallucination  by  the  images  one  has  evoked  as  doesn't 
permit  him  to  rest  till  he  has  noted  or  recorded  them,  set  up 
some  semblance  of  them  in  his  own  other  medium,  by  his 
own  other  art  —  nothing  could  better  consort  than  that,  I 
naturally  allow,  with  the  desire  or  the  pretension  to  cast  a 
literary  spell.  Charming,  that  is,  for  the  projector  and  cre 
ator  of  figures  and  scenes  that  are  as  nought  from  the  mo 
ment  they  fail  to  become  more  or  less  visible  appearances, 
charming  for  this  manipulator  of  aspects  to  see  such  power 
as  he  may  possess  approved  and  registered  by  the  springing 
of  such  fruit  from  his  seed.  His  own  garden,  however, 
remains  one  thing,  and  the  garden  he  has  prompted  the  cul 
tivation  of  at  other  hands  becomes  quite  another;  which 
means  that  the  frame  of  one's  own  work  no  more  provides 
place  for  such  a  plot  than  we  expect  flesh  and  fish  to  be 
served  on  the  same  platter.  One  welcomes  illustration,  in 
other  words,  with  pride  and  joy  ;  but  also  with  the  emphatic 
view  that,  might  one's  "  literary  jealousy  "  be  duly  deferred 
to,  it  would  quite  stand  off  and  on  its  own  feet  and  thus,  as 
a  separate  and  independent  subject  of  publication,  carrying 
its  text  in  its  spirit,  just  as  that  text  correspondingly  carries 
the  plastic  possibility,  become  a  still  more  glorious  tribute. 
So  far  my  invidious  distinction  between  the  writer's  "  frame  " 
and  the  draughtsman's  ;  and  if  in  spite  of  it  I  could  still 
make  place  for  the  idea  of  a  contribution  of  value  by  Mr. 
A.  L.  Coburn  to  each  of  these  volumes  —  and  a  contribu 
tion  in  as  different  a  u  medium  "  as  possible  — this  was  just 
because  the  proposed  photographic  studies  were  to  seek  the 
way,  which  they  have  happily  found,  I  think,  not  to  keep, 
or  to  pretend  to  keep,  anything  like  dramatic  step  with  their 
suggestive  matter.  This  would  quite  have  disqualified  them, 
to  my  rigour;  but  they  were  "all  right,"  in  the  so  analytic 
modern  critical  phrase,  through  their  discreetly  disavowing 
emulation.  Nothing  in  fact  could  more  have  amused  the 

x 


PREFACE 

author  than  the  opportunity  of  a  hunt  fora  series  of  repro 
ducible  subjects  —  such  moreover  as  might  best  consort  with 
photography  —  the  reference  of  which  to  Novel  or  Tale 
should  exactly  be  not  competitive  and  obvious,  should  on  the 
contrary  plead  its  case  with  some  shyness,  that  of  images 
always  confessing  themselves  mere  optical  symbols  or  echoes, 
expressions  of  no  particular  thing  in  the  text,  but  only  of 
the  type  or  idea  of  this  or  that  thing.  They  were  to  remain 
at  the  most  small  pictures  of  our  "  set "  stage  with  the 
actors  left  out  •,  and  what  was  above  all  interesting  was  that 
they  were  first  to  be  constituted. 

This  involved  an  amusing  search  which  I  would  fain  more 
fully  commemorate ;  since  it  took,  to  a  great  degree,  and 
rather  unexpectedly  and  incalculably,  the  vastly,  though  but 
incidentally,  instructive  form  of  an  enquiry  into  the  street- 
scenery  of  London ;  a  field  yielding  a  ripe  harvest  of  treas 
ure  from  the  moment  I  held  up  to  it,  in  my  fellow  artist's 
company,  the  light  of  our  fond  idea —  the  idea,  that  is,  of 
the  aspect  of  things  or  the  combination  of  objects  that  might, 
by  a  latent  virtue  in  it,  speak  for  its  connexion  with  some 
thing  in  the  book,  and  yet  at  the  same  time  speak  enough 
for  its  odd  or  interesting  self.  It  will  be  noticed  that  our 
series  of  frontispieces,  while  doing  all  justice  to  our  need, 
largely  consists  in  a  "  rendering"  of  certain  inanimate  char 
acteristics  of  London  streets  ;  the  ability  of  which  to  suf 
fice  to  this  furnishing  forth  of  my  Volumes  ministered  alike 
to  surprise  and  convenience.  Even  at  the  cost  of  inconsist 
ency  of  attitude  in  the  matter  of  the  "  grafted  "  image,  I 
should  have  been  tempted,  I  confess,  by  the  mere  pleasure 
of  exploration,  abounding  as  the  business  at  once  began 
to  do  in  those  prizes  of  curiosity  for  which  the  London- 
lover  is  at  any  time  ready  to  "back"  the  prodigious  city. 
It  was  n't  always  that  I  straightway  found,  with  my  fellow 
searcher,  what  we  were  looking  for,  but  that  the  looking 
itself  so  often  flooded  with  light  the  question  of  what  a 
"  subject,"  what  "  character,"  what  a  saving  sense  in  things, 
is  and  is  n't ;  and  that  when  our  quest  was  rewarded,  it  was, 
I  make  bold  to  say,  rewarded  in  perfection.  On  the  ques- 

xi 


PREFACE 

tion,  for  instance,  of  the  proper  preliminary  compliment  to 
the  first  volume  of  "  The  Golden  Bowl  "  we  easily  felt  that 
nothing  would  so  serve  as  a  view  of  the  small  shop  in  which 
the  Bowl  is  first  encountered. 

The  problem  thus  was  thrilling,  for  though  the  small  shop 
was  but  a  shop  of  the  mind,  of  the  author's  projected  world, 
in  which  objects  are  primarily  related  to  each  other,  and 
therefore  not  "  taken  from  "  a  particular  establishment  any 
where,  only  an  image  distilled  and  intensified,  as  it  were, 
from  a  drop  of  the  essence  of  such  establishments  in  gen 
eral,  our  need  (since  the  picture  was,  as  I  have  said,  also 
completely  to  speak  for  itself)  prescribed  a  concrete,  inde 
pendent,  vivid  instance,  the  instance  that  should  oblige  us 
by  the  marvel  of  an  accidental  Tightness.  It  might  so  easily 
be  wrong  —  by  the  act  of  being  at  all.  It  would  have  to  be 
in  the  first  place  what  London  and  chance  and  an  extreme 
improbability  should  have  made  it,  and  then  it  would  have 
to  let  us  truthfully  read  into  it  the  Prince's  and  Charlotte's 
and  the  Princess's  visits.  It  of  course  on  these  terms  long 
evaded  us,  but  all  the  while  really  without  prejudice  to  our 
fond  confidence  that,  as  London  ends  by  giving  one  abso 
lutely  everything  one  asks,  so  it  awaited  us  somewhere.  It 
awaited  us  in  fact  —  but  I  check  myself;  nothing,  I  find 
now,  would  induce  me  to  say  where.  Just  so,  to  conclude, 
it  was  equally  obvious  that  for  the  second  volume  of  the 
same  fiction  nothing  would  so  nobly  serve  as  some  general 
ised  vision  of  Portland  Place.  Both  our  limit  and  the  very 
extent  of  our  occasion,  however,  lay  in  the  fact  that,  unlike 
wanton  designers,  we  had,  not  to  "  create  "  but  simply  to 
recognise  —  recognise,  that  is,  with  the  last  fineness.  The 
thing  was  to  induce  the  vision  of  Portland  Place  to  general 
ise  itself.  This  is  precisely,  however,  the  fashion  after  which 
the  prodigious  city,  as  I  have  called  it,  does  on  occasion 
meet  halfway  those  forms  of  intelligence  of  it  that  it  re 
cognises.  All  of  which  meant  that  at  a  given  moment  the 
great  featureless  Philistine  vista  would  itself  perform  a  mir 
acle,  would  become  interesting,  for  a  splendid  atmospheric 
hour,  as  only  London  knows  how ;  and  that  our  business 

xii 


PREFACE 

would  be  then  to  understand.   But  my  record  of  that  lesson 
takes  me  too  far. 

So  much  for  some  only  of  the  suggestions  of  re-perusal, 
and  some  of  those  of  re-representation  here,  since,  all  the 
while,  I  feel  myself  awaited  by  an  occasion  more  urgent 
than  any  of  these.  To  re-read  in  their  order  my  final  things, 
all  of  comparatively  recent  date,  has  been  to  become  aware 
of  my  putting  the  process  through,  for  the  latter  end  of  my 
series  (as  well  as,  throughout,  for  most  of  its  later  constitu 
ents)  quite  in  the  same  terms  as  the  apparent  and  actual, 
the  contemporary  terms ;  to  become  aware  in  other  words 
that  the  march  of  my  present  attention  coincides  sufficiently 
with  the  march  of  my  original  expression  ;  that  my  appre 
hension  fits,  more  concretely  stated,  without  an  effort  or 
a  struggle,  certainly  without  bewilderment  or  anguish,  into 
the  innumerable  places  prepared  for  it.  As  the  historian  of 
the  matter  sees  and  speaks,  so  my  intelligence  of  it,  as  a 
reader,  meets  him  halfway,  passive,  receptive,  appreciative, 
often  even  gratsful ;  unconscious,  quite  blissfully,  of  any 
bar  to  intercourse,  any  disparity  of  sense  between  us.  Into 
his  very  footprints  the  responsive,  the  imaginative  steps  of 
the  docile  reader  that  I  consentingly  become  for  him  all  com 
fortably  sink ;  his  vision,  superimposed  on  my  own  as  an 
image  in  cut  paper  is  applied  to  a  sharp  shadow  on  a  wall, 
matches,  at  every  point,  without  excess  or  deficiency.  This 
truth  throws  into  relief  for  me  the  very  different  dance  that 
the  taking  in  hand  of  my  earlier  productions  was  to  lead  me; 
the  quite  other  kind  of  consciousness  proceeding  from  that 
return.  Nothing  in  my  whole  renewal  of  attention  to  these 
things,  to  almost  any  instance  of  my  work  previous  to  some 
dozen  years  ago,  was  more  evident  than  that  no  such  active, 
appreciative  process  could  take  place  on  the  mere  palpable 
lines  of  expression  —  thanks  to  the  so  frequent  lapse  of  har 
mony  between  my  present  mode  of  motion  and  that  to  which 
the  existing  footprints  were  due.  It  was,  all  sensibly,  as  if 
the  clear  matter  being  still  there,  even  as  a  shining  expanse 
of  snow  spread  over  a  plain,  my  exploring  tread,  for  appli 
cation  to  it,  had  quite  unlearned  the  old  pace  and  found 

xiii 


PREFACE 

itself  naturally  falling  into  another,  which  might  sometimes 
indeed  more  or  less  agree  with  the  original  tracks,  but  might 
most  often,  or  very  nearly,  break  the  surface  in  other  places. 
What  was  thus  predominantly  interesting  to  note,  at  all 
events,  was  the  high  spontaneity  of  these  deviations  and 
differences,  which  became  thus  things  not  of  choice,  but 
of  immediate  and  perfect  necessity  :  necessity  to  the  end  of 
dealing  with  the  quantities  in  question  at  all. 

No  march,  accordingly,  I  was  soon  enough  aware,  could 
possibly  be  more  confident  and  free  than  this  infinitely  inter 
esting  and  amusing  act  of  re-appropriation ;  shaking  off  all 
shackles  of  theory,  unattended,  as  was  speedily  to  appear, 
with  humiliating  uncertainties,  and  almost  as  enlivening,  or 
at  least  as  momentous,  as,  to  a  philosophic  mind,  a  sudden 
large  apprehension  of  the  Absolute.  What  indeed  could  be 
more  delightful  than  to  enjoy  a  sense  of  the  absolute  in  such 
easy  conditions  ?  The  deviations  and  differences  might  of 
course  not  have  broken  out  at  all,  but  from  the  moment 
they  began  so  naturally  to  multiply  they  became,  as  I  say, 
my  very  terms  of  cognition.  The  question  of  the  "  revision  " 
of  existing  work  had  loomed  large  for  me,  had  seemed  even 
at  moments  to  bristle  with  difficulties;  but  that  phase  of 
anxiety,  I  was  rejoicingly  to  learn,  belonged  all  but  to  the 
state  of  postponed  experience  or  to  that  of  a  prolonged  and 
fatalistic  indifference.  Since  to  get  and  to  keep  finished  and 
dismissed  work  well  behind  one,  and  to  have  as  little  to  say 
to  it  and  about  it  as  possible,  had  been  for  years  one's  only 
law,  so,  during  that  flat  interregnum,  involving,  as  who 
should  say,  the  very  cultivation  of  unacquaintedness,  creep 
ing  superstitions  as  to  what  it  might  really  have  been  had 
time  to  grow  up  and  flourish.  Not  least  among  these  rioted 
doubtless  the  fond  fear  that  any  tidying-up  of  the  uncanny 
brood,  any  removal  of  accumulated  dust,  any  washing  of 
wizened  faces,  or  straightening  of  grizzled  locks,  or  twitch 
ing,  to  a  better  effect,  of  superannuated  garments,  might  let 
one  in,  as  the  phrase  is,  for  expensive  renovations.  I  make 
use  here  of  the  figure  of  age  and  infirmity,  but  in  point  of 
fact  I  had  rather  viewed  the  reappearance  of  the  first-born 

xiv 


PREFACE 

of  my  progeny  —  a  reappearance  unimaginable  save  to  some 
inheritance  of  brighter  and  more  congruous  material  form, 
of  stored-up  braveries  of  type  and  margin  and  ample  page, 
of  general  dignity  and  attitude,  than  had  mostly  waited  on 
their  respective  casual  cradles  —  as  a  descent  of  awkward 
infants  from  the  nursery  to  the  drawing-room  under  the  kind 
appeal  of  enquiring,  of  possibly  interested,  visitors.  I  had 
accordingly  taken  for  granted  the  common  decencies  of  such 
a  case  —  the  responsible  glance  of  some  power  above  from 
one  nursling  to  another,  the  rapid  flash  of  an  anxious  needle, 
the  not  imperceptible  effect  of  a  certain  audible  splash  of 
soap-and-water;  all  in  consideration  of  the  searching  radi 
ance  of  drawing-room  lampsascompared  with  nursery  candles. 
But  it  had  been  all  the  while  present  to  me  that  from  the 
moment  a  stitch  should  be  taken  or  a  hair-brush  applied  the 
principle  of  my  making  my  brood  more  presentable  under 
the  nobler  illumination  would  be  accepted  and  established, 
and  it  was  there  complications  might  await  me.  I  am  afraid 
I  had  at  stray  moments  wasted  time  in  wondering  what  dis 
crimination  against  the  freedom  of  the  needle  and  the  sponge 
would  be  able  to  describe  itself  as  not  arbitrary.  For  it  to 
confess  to  that  taint  would  be  of  course  to  write  itself  detest 
able. 

"  Hands  off  altogether  on  the  nurse's  part !  "  was,  as  a 
merely  barbarous  injunction,  strictly  conceivable ;  but  only 
in  the  light  of  the  truth  that  it  had  never  taken  effect  in  any 
fair  and  stately,  in  any  not  vulgarly  irresponsible  re-issue 
of  anything.  Therefore  it  was  easy  to  see  that  any  such 
apologetic  suppression  as  that  of  the  "  altogether,"  any  such 
admission  as  that  of  a  single  dab  of  the  soap,  left  the  door 
very  much  ajar.  Any  request  that  an  indulgent  objector  to 
drawing-room  discipline,  to  the  purification,  in  other  words, 
of  innocent  childhood,  should  kindly  measure  out  then  the 
appropriate  amount  of  ablutional  fluid  for  the  whole  case, 
would,  on  twenty  grounds,  indubitably  leave  that  invoked 
judge  gaping.  I  had  none  the  less,  I  repeat,  at  muddled 
moments,  seemed  to  see  myself  confusedly  invoke  him  ; 
thanks  to  my  but  too  naturally  not  being  able  to  forecast  the 

XV 


PREFACE 

perfect  grace  with  which  an  answer  to  all  my  questions  was 
meanwhile  awaiting  me.  To  expose  the  case  frankly  to  a 
test  — in  other  words  to  begin  to  re-read  — was  at  once  to 
get  nearer  all  its  elements  and  so,  as  by  the  next  felicity, 
feel  it  purged  of  every  doubt.  It  was  the  nervous  postpone 
ment  of  that  respectful  approach  that  I  spoke  of  just  now 
as,  in  the  connexion,  my  waste  of  time.  This  felt  awk 
wardness  sprang,  as  I  was  at  a  given  moment  to  perceive, 
from  my  too  abject  acceptance  of  the  grand  air  with  which 
the  term  Revision  had  somehow,  to  my  imagination,  carried 
itself — and  from  my  frivolous  failure  to  analyse  the  con 
tent  of  the  word.  To  revise  is  to  see,  or  to  look  over, 
again  —  which  means  in  the  case  of  a  written  thing  neither 
more  nor  less  than  to  re-read  it.  I  had  attached  to  it,  in  a 
brooding  spirit,  the  idea  of  re-writing — with  which  it  was 
to  have  in  the  event,  for  my  conscious  play  of  mind,  almost 
nothing  in  common.  I  had  thought  of  re-writing  as  so  dif 
ficult,  and  even  so  absurd,  as  to  be  impossible  —  having  also 
indeed,  for  that  matter,  thought  of  re-reading  in  the  same 
light.  But  the  felicity  under  the  test  was  that  where  I  had 
thus  ruefully  prefigured  two  efforts  there  proved  to  be  but 
one  —  and  this  an  effort  but  at  the  first  blush.  What  re 
writing  might  be  was  to  remain  —  it  has  remained  for  me 
to  this  hour  —  a  mystery.  On  the  other  hand  the  act  of 
revision,  the  act  of  seeing  it  again,  caused  whatever  I  looked 
at  on  any  page  to  flower  before  me  as  into  the  only  terms 
that  honourably  expressed  it ;  and  the  "  revised  "  element 
in  the  present  Edition  is  accordingly  these  terms,  these  rigid 
conditions  of  re-perusal,  registered  ;  so  many  close  notes,  as 
who  should  say,  on  the  particular  vision  of  the  matter  itself 
that  experience  had  at  last  made  the  only  possible  one. 

What  it  would  be  really  interesting,  and  I  dare  say  admir 
ably  difficult,  to  go  into  would  be  the  very  history  of  this 
effect  of  experience  ;  the  history,  in  other  words,  of  the 
growth  of  the  immense  array  of  terms,  perceptional  and  ex- 
pressional,  that,  after  the  fashion  1  have  indicated,  in  sent 
ence,  passage  and  page,  simply  looked  over  the  heads  of 
the  standing  terms  —  or  perhaps  rather,  like  alert  winged 

xvi 


PREFACE 

creatures,  perched  on  those  diminished  summits  and  aspired 
to  a  clearer  air.  What  it  comes  back  to,  for  the  maturer 
mind  —  granting  of  course,  to  begin  with,  a  mind  accessible 
to  questions  of  such  an  order  —  is  this  attaching  speculative 
interest  of  the  matter,  or  in  vulgar  parlance  the  inordinate 
intellectual  "  sport  "  of  it :  the  how  and  the  whence  and  the 
why  these  intenser  lights  of  experience  come  into  being  and 
insist  on  shining.  The  interest  of  the  question  is  attaching, 
as  I  say,  because  really  half  the  artist's  life  seems  involved 
in  it  —  or  doubtless,  to  speak  more  justly,  the  whole  of  his 
life  intellectual.  The  "  old  "  matter  is  there,  re-accepted, 
re-tasted,  exquisitely  re-assimilated  and  re-enjoyed  —  be 
lieved  in,  to  be  brief,  with  the  same  "  old  "  grateful  faith 
(since  wherever  the  faith,  in  a  particular  case,  has  become 
aware  of  a  twinge  of  doubt  I  have  simply  concluded  against 
the  matter  itself  and  left  it  out) ;  yet  for  due  testimony,  for 
re-assertion  of  value,  perforating  as  by  some  strange  and  fine, 
some  latent  and  gathered  force,  a  myriad  more  adequate 
channels.  It  is  over  the  fact  of  such  a  phenomenon  and  its 
so  possibly  rich  little  history  that  I  am  moved  just  fondly  to 
linger  —  and  for  the  reason  I  glanced  at  above,  that  to  do  so 
is  in  a  manner  to  retrace  the  whole  growth  of  one's  "  taste," 
as  our  fathers  used  to  say :  a  blessed  comprehensive  name 
for  many  of  the  things  deepest  in  us.  The  "  taste  "  of  the 
poet  is,  at  bottom  and  so  far  as  the  poet  in  him  prevails  over 
everything  else,  his  active  sense  of  life  :  in  accordance  with 
which  truth  to  keep  one's  hand  on  it  is  to  hold  the  silver 
clue  to  the  whole  labyrinth  of  his  consciousness.  He  feels 
this  himself,  good  man  —  he  recognises  an  attached  import 
ance  —  whenever  he  feels  that  consciousness  bristle  with 
the  notes,  as  I  have  called  them,  of  consenting  re-perusal ; 
as  has  again  and  again  publicly  befallen  him,  to  our  no  small 
edification,  on  occasions  within  recent  view.  It  has  befallen 
him  most  frequently,  I  recognise,  when  the  supersessive 
terms  of  his  expression  have  happened  to  be  verse  ;  but  that 
does  n't  in  the  least  isolate  his  case,  since  it  is  clear  to  the 
most  limited  intelligence  that  the  title  we  give  him  is  the  only 
title  of  general  application  and  convenience  for  those  who 

xvii 


PREFACE 

passionately  cultivate  the  image  of  life  and  the  art,  on  the 
whole  so  beneficial,  of  projecting  it.  The  seer  and  speaker 
under  the  descent  of  the  god  is  the  "  poet,"  whatever  his 
form,  and  he  ceases  to  be  one  only  when  his  form,  whatever 
else  it  may  nominally  or  superficially  or  vulgarly  be,  is  un 
worthy  of  the  god :  in  which  event,  we  promptly  submit, 
he  is  n't  worth  talking  of  at  all.  He  becomes  so  worth  it, 
and  the  god  so  adopts  him,  and  so  confirms  his  charming 
office  and  name,  in  the  degree  in  which  his  impulse  and 
passion  are  general  and  comprehensive  —  a  definitional  pro 
vision  for  them  that  makes  but  a  mouthful  of  so  minor  a 
distinction,  in  the  fields  of  light,  as  that  between  verse  and 
prose. 

The  circumstance  that  the  poets  then,  and  the  more  charm 
ing  ones,  have  in  a  number  of  instances,  with  existing  mat 
ter  in  hand,  "  registered  "  their  renewals  of  vision,  attests 
quite  enough  the  attraction  deeply  working  whenever  the 
mind  is,  as  I  have  said,  accessible  —  accessible,  that  is,  to 
the  finer  appeal  of  accumulated  "  good  stuff"  and  to  the 
interest  of  taking  it  in  hand  at  all.  For  myself,  I  am  prompted 
to  note,  the  "  taking  "  has  been  to  my  consciousness,  through 
the  whole  procession  of  this  re-issue,  the  least  part  of  the 
affair  :  under  the  first  touch  of  the  spring  my  hands  were  to 
feel  themselves  full ;  so  much  more  did  it  become  a  ques 
tion,  on  the  part  of  the  accumulated  good  stuff,  of  seeming 
insistently  to  give  and  give.  I  have  alluded  indeed  to  cer 
tain  lapses  of  that  munificence  —  or  at  least  to  certain  con 
nexions  in  which  I  found  myself  declining  to  receive  again 
on  any  terms ;  but  for  the  rest  the  sense  of  receiving  has 
borne  me  company  without  a  break ;  a  luxury  making  for 
its  sole  condition  that  I  should  intelligently  attend.  The 
blest  good  stuff,  sitting  up,  in  its  myriad  forms,  so  touch- 
ingly  responsive  to  new  care  of  any  sort  whatever,  seemed 
to  pass  with  meadelightful  bargain, and  in  the  fewest  possible 
words.  "  Actively  believe  in  us  and  then  you  '11  see  !  "  —  it 
was  n't  more  complicated  than  that,  and  yet  was  to  become 
as  thrilling  as  if  conditioned  on  depth  within  depth.  I  saw 
therefore  what  I  saw,  and  what  these  numerous  pages  record, 

xviii 


PREFACE 

I  trust,  with  clearness ;  though  one  element  of  fascination 
tended  all  the  while  to  rule  the  business  —  a  fascination,  at 
each  stage  of  my  journey,  on  the  noted  score  of  that  so  shift 
ing  and  uneven  character  of  the  tracks  of  my  original  pass 
age.  This  by  itself  introduced  the  charm  of  suspense  :  what 
would  the  operative  terms,  in  the  given  case,  prove,  under 
criticism,  to  have  been  —  a  series  of  waiting  satisfactions  or 
an  array  of  waiting  misfits  ?  The  misfits  had  but  to  be  posi 
tive  and  concordant,  in  the  special  intenser  light,  to  repre 
sent  together  (as  the  two  sides  of  a  coin  show  different 
legends)  just  so  many  effective  felicities  and  substitutes.  But 
I  could  n't  at  all,  in  general,  forecast  these  chances  and 
changes  and  proportions  ;  they  could  but  show  for  what  they 
were  as  I  went ;  criticism  after  the  fact  was  to  find  in  them 
arrests  and  surprises,  emotions  alike  of  disappointment  and 
of  elation  :  all  of  which  means,  obviously,  that  the  whole 
thing  was  a  living  affair. 

The  rate  at  which  new  readings,  new  conductors  of  sense 
interposed,  to  make  any  total  sense  at  all  right,  became,  to 
this  wonderful  tune,  the  very  record  and  mirror  of  the  gen 
eral  adventure  of  one's  intelligence  ;  so  that  one  at  all  times 
quite  marvelled  at  the  fair  reach,  the  very  length  of  arm,  of 
such  a  developed  difference  of  measure  as  to  what  might  and 
what  might  n't  constitute,  all  round,  a  due  decency  of  "  ren 
dering."  What  I  have  been  most  aware  of  asking  myself, 
however,  is  how  writers,  on  such  occasions  of  "  revision," 
arrive  at  that  successful  resistance  to  the  confident  assault 
of  the  new  reading  which  appears  in  the  great  majority  of 
examples  to  have  marked  their  course.  The  term  that  super 
latively,  that  finally  "  renders,"  is  a  flower  that  blooms  by 
a  beautiful  law  of  its  own  (the  fiftieth  part  of  a  second  often 
so  sufficing  it)  in  the  very  heart  of  the  gathered  sheaf;  it  is 
there  already,  at  any  moment,  almost  before  one  can  either 
miss  or  suspect  it  —  so  that  in  short  we  shall  never  guess, 
I  think,  the  working  secret  of  the  revisionist  for  whom  its 
colour  and  scent  stir  the  air  but  as  immediately  to  be  assimi 
lated.  Failing  our  divination,  too,  we  shall  apparently  not 
otherwise  learn,  for  the  simple  reason  that  no  revisionist  I 

xix 


PREFACE 

can  recall  has  ever  been  communicative.  "  People  don't  do 
such  things,"  we  remember  to  have  heard  it,  in  this  connex 
ion,  declared  ;  in  other  words  they  don't  really  re-read  —  no, 
not  really ;  at  least  they  do  so  to  the  effect  either  of  seeing 
the  buried,  the  latent  life  of  a  past  composition  vibrate,  at 
renewal  of  touch,  into  no  activity  and  break  through  its 
settled  and  "  sunk  "  surface  at  no  point  whatever  —  on  which 
conclusion,  I  hasten  to  add,  the  situation  remains  simple  and 
their  responsibility  may  lie  down  beside  their  work  even  as 
the  lion  beside  the  lamb  ;  or  else  they  have  in  advance  and 
on  system  stopped  their  ears,  their  eyes  and  even  their  very 
noses.  This  latter  heroic  policy  I  find  myself  glancing  at, 
however,  to  wonder  in  what  particular  cases  —  failing,  as  I 
say,  all  the  really  confessed  —  it  can  have  been  applied.  The 
actual  non-revisionists  (on  any  terms)  are  of  course  numer 
ous  enough,  and  with  plenty  to  say  for  themselves  ;  their 
faith,  clearly,  is  great,  their  lot  serene  and  their  peace,  above 
all,  equally  protected  and  undisturbed.  But  the  tantalising 
image  of  the  revisionist  who  is  n't  one,  the  partial,  the  piece 
meal  revisionist,  inconsequent  and  insincere,  this  obscure 
and  decidedly  louche  personage  hovers  before  me  mainly,  I 
think,  but  to  challenge  my  belief.  Where  have  we  met  him, 
when  it  comes  to  that,  in  the  walks  of  interesting  prose 
literature,  and  why  assume  that  we  have  to  believe  in  him 
before  we  are  absolutely  forced  ? 

If  I  turn  for  relief  and  contrast  to  some  image  of  his  op 
posite  I  at  once  encounter  it,  and  with  a  completeness  that 
leaves  nothing  to  be  desired,  on  any  u  old  "  ground,  in  pre 
sence  of  any  "  old  "  life,  in  the  vast  example  of  Balzac.  He 
(and  these  things,  as  we  know,  grew  behind  him  at  an  ex 
traordinary  rate)  re-assaulted  by  supersessive  terms,  re-pen 
etrated  by  finer  channels,  never  had  on  the  one  hand  seen 
or  said  all  or  had  on  the  other  ceased  to  press  forward.  His 
case  has  equal  mass  and  authority  —  and  beneath  its  pro 
tecting  shade,  at  any  rate,  I  move  for  the  brief  remainder 
of  these  remarks.  We  owe  to  the  never-extinct  operation  of 
his  sensibility,  we  have  but  meanwhile  to  recall,  our  greatest 
exhibition  of  felt  finalities,  our  richest  and  hugest  inheritance 

xx 


PREFACE 

of  imaginative  prose.  That  by  itself  might  intensify  for  me 
the  interest  of  this  general  question  of  the  reviving  and  re 
acting  vision  —  did  n't  my  very  own  lucky  experience,  all 
so  publicly  incurred,  give  me,  as  my  reader  may  easily  make 
out,  quite  enough  to  think  of.  I  almost  lose  myself,  it  may 
perhaps  seem  to  him,  in  that  obscure  quantity  ;  obscure  doubt 
less  because  of  its  consisting  of  the  manifold  delicate  things, 
the  shy  and  illusive,  the  inscrutable,  the  indefinable,  that  min 
ister  to  deep  and  quite  confident  processes  of  change.  It  is 
enough,  in  any  event,  to  be  both  beguiled  and  mystified  by 
evolutions  so  near  home,  without  sounding  strange  and  prob 
ably  even  more  abysmal  waters.  Since,  however,  an  agree 
able  flurry  and  an  imperfect  presence  of  mind  might,  on  the 
former  ground,  still  be  such  a  source  of  refreshment,  so  the 
constant  refrain  humming  through  the  agitation, "  If  only 
one  could  re-write,  if  only  one  could  do  better  justice  to  the 
patches  of  crude  surface,  the  poor  morsels  of  consciously- 
decent  matter  that  catch  one's  eye  with  their  rueful  reproach 
for  old  stupidities  of  touch  !  "  —  so  that  yearning  reflexion,  I 
say, was  to  have  its  superlativeas  well  as  its  positive  moments. 
It  was  to  reach  its  maximum,  no  doubt,  over  many  of  the 
sorry  businesses  of  "  The  American,"  for  instance,  where, 
given  the  elements  and  the  essence,  the  long-stored  grievance 
of  the  subject  bristling  with  a  sense  of  over-prolonged  ex 
posure  in  a  garment  misfitted,  a  garment  cheaply  embroidered 
and  unworthy  of  it,  thereby  most  proportionately  sounded 
their  plaint.  This  sharpness  of  appeal,  the  claim  for  exem 
plary  damages,  or  at  least  for  poetic  justice,  was  reduced  to 
nothing,  on  the  other  hand,  in  presence  of  the  altogether 
better  literary  manners  of  "  The  Ambassadors  "  and  "  The 
Golden  Bowl" — a  list  I  might  much  extend  by  the  men 
tion  of  several  shorter  pieces. 

Inevitably,  in  such  a  case  as  that  of  "  The  American,"  and 
scarce  less  indeed  in  those  of  "  The  Portrait  of  a  Lady  " 
and  "  The  Princess  Casamassima,"  each  of  these  efforts  so 
redolent  of  good  intentions  baffled  by  a  treacherous  vehicle, 
an  expertness  too  retarded,  I  could  but  dream  the  whole 
thing  over  as  I  went  —  as  I  read  j  and,  bathing  it,  so  to  speak, 
.  xxi 


PREFACE 

in  that  medium,  hope  that,  some  still  newer  and  shrewder 
critic's  intelligence  subtly  operating,!  shouldn't  have  breathed 
upon  the  old  catastrophes  and  accidents,  the  old  wounds  and 
mutilations  and  disfigurements,  wholly  in  vain.  The  same 
is  true  of  the  possible  effect  of  this  process  of  re-dreaming 
on  many  of  these  gathered  compositions,  shorter  and  longer; 
I  have  prayed  that  the  finer  air  of  the  better  form  may  suf 
ficiently  seem  to  hang  about  them  and  gild  them  over  —  at 
least  for  readers,  however  few,  at  all  curious  of  questions  of 
air  and  form.  Nothing  even  at  this  point,  and  in  these  quite 
final  remarks,  I  confess,  could  strike  me  as  more  pertinent 
than  —  with  a  great  wealth  of  margin  —  to  attempt  to  scatter 
here  a  few  gleams  of  the  light  in  which  some  of  my  visions 
have  all  sturdily  and  complacently  repeated  and  others  have, 
according  to  their  kind  and  law,  all  joyously  and  blushingly 
renewed  themselves.  These  have  doubtless  both  been  ways 
of  remaining  unshamed ;  though,  for  myself,  on  the  whole, 
as  I  seem  to  make  out,  the  interest  of  the  watched  renewal 
has  been  livelier  than  that  of  the  accepted  repetition.  What 
has  the  affair  been  at  the  worst,  I  am  most  moved  to  ask, 
but  an  earnest  invitation  to  the  reader  to  dream  again  in  my 
company  and  in  the  interest  of  his  own  larger  absorption 
of  my  sense  ?  The  prime  consequence  on  one's  own  part  of 
re-perusal  is  a  sense  for  ever  so  many  more  of  the  shining 
silver  fish  afloat  in  the  deep  sea  of  one's  endeavour  than  the 
net  of  widest  casting  could  pretend  to  gather  in  ;  an  author's 
common  courtesy  dictating  thus  the  best  general  course  for 
making  that  sense  contagious  —  so  beautifully  tangled  a  web, 
when  not  so  glorious  a  crown,  does  he  weave  by  having  at 
heart,  and  by  cherishing  there,  the  confidence  he  has  invited 
or  imagined.  There  is  then  absolutely  no  release  to  his 
pledged  honour  on  the  question  of  repaying  that  confidence. 
The  ideally  handsome  way  is  for  him  to  multiply  in  any 
given  connexion  all  the  possible  sources  of  entertainment  — 
or,  more  grossly  expressing  it  again,  to  intensify  his  whole 
chance  of  pleasure.  (It  all  comes  back  to  that,  to  my  and 
your  "  fun  "  —  if  we  but  allow  the  term  its  full  extension ; 
to  the  production  of  which  no  humblest  question  involved, 

xxii 


PREFACE 

even  to  that  of  the  shade  of  a  cadence  or  the  position  of  a 
comma,  is  not  richly  pertinent.)  We  have  but  to  think  a  mo 
ment  of  such  a  matter  as  the  play  of  representational  values, 
those  that  make  it  a  part,  and  an  important  part,  of  our  tak 
ing  offered  things  in  that  we  should  take  them  as  aspects 
and  visibilities  —  take  them  to  the  utmost  as  appearances, 
images,  figures,  objects,  so  many  important,  so  many  con- 
tributive  items  of  the  furniture  of  the  world  —  in  order  to 
feel  immediately  the  effect  of  such  a  condition  at  every  turn 
of  our  adventure  and  every  point  of  the  representative  sur 
face.  One  has  but  to  open  the  door  to  any  forces  of  exhibi 
tion  at  all  worthy  of  the  name  in  order  to  see  the  imaging 
and  qualifying  agency  called  at  once  into  play  and  put  on 
its  mettle.  We  may  traverse  acres  of  pretended  exhibitory 
prose  from  which  the  touch  that  directly  evokes  and  finely 
presents,  the  touch  that  operates  for  closeness  and  for  charm, 
for  conviction  and  illusion,  for  communication,  in  a  word, 
is  unsurpassably  absent.  All  of  which  but  means  of  course 
that  the  reader  is,  in  the  common  phrase,  "  sold  "  —  even 
when,  poor  passive  spirit,  systematically  bewildered  and  bam 
boozled  on  the  article  of  his  dues,  he  may  be  but  dimly  aware 
of  it.  He  has  by  the  same  token  and  for  the  most  part,  I 
fear,  a  scarce  quicker  sensibility  on  other  heads,  least  of  all 
perhaps  on  such  a  matter  as  his  really  quite  swindled  state 
when  the  pledge  given  for  his  true  beguilement  fails  to 
ensure  him  that  fullest  experience  of  his  pleasure  which  waits 
but  on  a  direct  reading  out  of  the  addressed  appeal.  It  is  scarce 
necessary  to  note  that  the  highest  test  of  any  literary  form 
conceived  in  the  light  of"  poetry  "  —  to  apply  that  term  in 
its  largest  literary  sense  —  hangs  back  unpardonably  from 
its  office  when  it  fails  to  lend  itself  to  viva-voce  treatment. 
We  talk  here,  naturally,  not  of  non-poetic  forms,  but  of 
those  whose  highest  bid  is  addressed  to  the  imagination,  to 
the  spiritual  and  the  aesthetic  vision,  the  mind  led  captive 
by  a  charm  and  a  spell,  an  incalculable  art.  The  essential 
property  of  such  a  form  as  that  is  to  give  out  its  finest  and 
most  numerous  secrets,  and  to  give  them  out  most  gratefully, 
under  the  closest  pressure  —  which  is  of  course  the  pressure 

xxiii 


PREFACE 

of  the  attention  articulately  sounded.  Let  it  reward  as  much 
as  it  will  and  can  the  soundless,  the  "  quiet "  reading,  it 
still  deplorably  "  muffs "  its  chance  and  its  success,  still 
trifles  with  the  roused  appetite  to  which  it  can  never  hon 
estly  be  indifferent,  by  not  having  so  arranged  itself  as  to 
owe  the  flower  of  its  effect  to  the  act  and  process  of  appre 
hension  that  so  beautifully  asks  most  from  it.  It  then  infal 
libly,  and  not  less  beautifully,  most  responds  ;  for  I  have 
nowhere  found  vindicated  the  queer  thesis  that  the  right 
values  of  interesting  prose  depend  all  on  withheld  tests  — 
that  is  on  its  being,  for  very  pity  and  shame,  but  skimmed 
and  scanted,  shuffled  and  mumbled.  Gustave  Flaubert  has 
somewhere  in  this  connexion  an  excellent  word  —  to  the 
effect  that  any  imaged  prose  that  fails  to  be  richly  rewarding 
in  return  for  a  competent  utterance  ranks  itself  as  wrong 
through  not  being  "  in  the  conditions  of  life."  The  more 
we  remain  in  them,  all  round,  the  more  pleasure  we  dispense  ; 
the  moral  of  which  is  —  and  there  would  be  fifty  other  per 
tinent  things  to  say  about  this  —  that  I  have  found  revision 
intensify  at  every  step  my  impulse  intimately  to  answer,  by 
my  light,  to  those  conditions. 

All  of  which  amounts  doubtless  but  to  saying  that  as  the 
whole  conduct  of  life  consists  of  things  done,  which  do  other 
things  in  their  turn,  just  so  our  behaviour  and  its  fruits  are 
essentially  one  and  continuous  and  persistent  and  unquench 
able,  so  the  act  has  its  way  of  abiding  and  showing  and  testi 
fying,  and  so,  among  our  innumerable  acts,  are  no  arbitrary, 
no  senseless  separations.  The  more  we  are  capable  of  act 
ing  the  less  gropingly  we  plead  such  differences;  whereby, 
with  any  capability,  we  recognise  betimes  that  to  u  put  " 
things  is  very  exactly  and  responsibly  and  interminably  to 
do  them.  Our  expression  of  them,  and  the  terms  on  which 
we  understand  that,  belong  as  nearly  to  our  conduct  and  our 
life  as  every  other  feature  of  our  freedom  ;  these  things  yield 
in  fact  some  of  its  most  exquisite  material  to  the  religion  of 
doing.  More  than  that,  our  literary  deeds  enjoy  this  marked 
advantage  over  many  of  our  acts,  that,  though  they  go  forth 
into  the  world  and  stray  even  in  the  desert,  they  don't  to 

xxiv 


PREFACE 

the  same  extent  lose  themselves ;  their  attachment  and  re~ 
ference  to  us,  however  strained,  need  n't  necessarily  lapse  — 
while  of  the  tie  that  binds  us  to  them  we  may  make  almost 
anything  we  like.  We  are  condemned,  in  other  words,  whether 
we  will  or  no,  to  abandon  and  outlive,  to  forget  and  disown 
and  hand  over  to  desolation,  many  vital  or  social  perform 
ances —  if  only  because  the  traces,  records,  connexions, 
the  very  memorials  we  would  fain  preserve,  are  practically 
impossible  to  rescue  for  that  purpose  from  the  general  mix 
ture.  We  give  them  up  even  when  we  would  n't  —  it  is  not 
a  question  of  choice.  Not  so  on  the  other  hand  our  really 
"  done  "  things  of  this  superior  and  more  appreciable  order 
—  which  leave  us  indeed  all  licence  of  disconnexion  and  dis 
avowal,  but  positively  impose  on  us  no  such  necessity.  Our 
relation  to  them  is  essentially  traceable,  and  in  that  fact 
abides,  we  feel,  the  incomparable  luxury  of  the  artist.  It 
rests  altogether  with  himself  not  to  break  with  his  values, 
not  to  "  give  away "  his  importances.  Not  to  be  dis 
connected,  for  the  tradition  of  behaviour,  he  has  but  to  feel 
that  he  is  not ;  by  his  lightest  touch  the  whole  chain  of 
relation  and  responsibility  is  reconstituted.  Thus  if  he  is  al 
ways  doing  he  can  scarce,  by  his  own  measure,  ever  have 
done.  All  of  which  means  for  him  conduct  with  a  vengeance, 
since  it  is  conduct  minutely  and  publicly  attested.  Our  noted 
behaviour  at  large  may  show  for  ragged,  because  it  perpetually 
escapes  our  control ;  we  have  again  and  again  to  consent  to 
its  appearing  in  undress  —  that  is  in  no  state  to  brook  criti 
cism.  But  on  all  the  ground  to  which  the  pretension  of  per 
formance  by  a  series  of  exquisite  laws  may  apply  there  reigns 
one  sovereign  truth  —  which  decrees  that,  as  art  is  nothing 
if  not  exemplary,  care  nothing  if  not  active,  finish  nothing 
if  not  consistent,  the  proved  error  is  the  base  apologetic 
deed,  the  helpless  regret  is  the  barren  commentary,  and 
"  connexions  "  are  employable  for  finer  purposes  than  mere 
gaping  contrition. 

HENRY  JAMES. 


BOOK  FIRST 
THE  PRINCE 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 


THE  Prince  had  always  liked  his  London,  when  it 
had  come  to  him;  he  was  one  of  the  Modern  Romans 
who  find  by  the  Thames  a  more  convincing  image  of 
the  truth  of  the  ancient  state  than  any  they  have  left 
by  the  Tiber.  Brought  up  on  the  legend  of  the  City  to 
which  the  world  paid  tribute,  he  recognised  in  the  pre 
sent  London  much  more  than  in  contemporary  Rome 
the  real  dimensions  of  such  a  case.  If  it  was  a  ques 
tion  of  an  Imperium,  he  said  to  himself,  and  if  one 
wished,  as  a  Roman,  to  recover  a  little  the  sense  of 
that,  the  place  to  do  so  was  on  London  Bridge,  or 
even,  on  a  fine  afternoon  in  May,  at  Hyde  Park  Cor 
ner.  It  was  not  indeed  to  either  of  those  places  that 
these  grounds  of  his  predilection,  after  all  sufficiently 
vague,  had,  at  the  moment  we  are  concerned  with  him, 
guided  his  steps;  he  had  strayed  simply  enough  into 
Bond  Street,  where  his  imagination,  working  at  com 
paratively  short  range,  caused  him  now  and  then  to 
stop  before  a  window  in  which  objects  massive  and 
lumpish,  in  silver  and  gold,  in  the  forms  to  which 
precious  stones  contribute,  or  in  leather,  steel,  brass, 
applied  to  a  hundred  uses  and  abuses,  were  as  tum 
bled  together  as  if,  in  the  insolence  of  the  Empire, 
they  had  been  the  loot  of  far-off  victories.  The  young 

3 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

man's  movements,  however,  betrayed  no  consist 
ency  of  attention  —  not  even,  for  that  matter,  when 
one  of  his  arrests  had  proceeded  from  possibilities 
in  faces  shaded,  as  they  passed  him  on  the  pavement, 
by  huge  beribboned  hats,  or  more  delicately  tinted 
still  under  the  tense  silk  of  parasols  held  at  perverse 
angles  in  waiting  victorias.  And  the  Prince's  undi 
rected  thought  was  not  a  little  symptomatic,  since, 
though  the  turn  of  the  season  had  come  and  the  flush 
of  the  streets  begun  to  fade,  the  possibilities  of  faces, 
on  the  August  afternoon,  were  still  one  of  the  notes 
of  the  scene.  He  was  too  restless  —  that  was  the  fact 
—  for  any  concentration,  and  the  last  idea  that  would 
just  now  have  occurred  to  him  in  any  connexion 
was  the  idea  of  pursuit. 

He  had  been  pursuing  for  six  months  as  never  in 
his  life  before,  and  what  had  actually  unsteadied  him, 
as  we  join  him,  was  the  sense  of  how  he  had  been 
justified.  Capture  had  crowned  the  pursuit — or  suc 
cess,  as  he  would  otherwise  have  put  it,  had  rewarded 
virtue;  whereby  the  consciousness  of  these  things 
made  him  for  the  hour  rather  serious  than  gay.  A 
sobriety  that  might  have  consorted  with  failure  sat 
in  his  handsome  face,  constructively  regular  and 
grave,  yet  at  the  same  time  oddly  and,  as  might  be, 
functionally  almost  radiant,  with  its  dark  blue  eyes, 
its  dark  brown  moustache  and  its  expression  no  more 
sharply  "foreign"  to  an  English  view  than  to  have 
caused  it  sometimes  to  be  observed  of  him  with  a 
shallow  felicity  that  he  looked  like  a  "refined" 
Irishman.  What  had  happened  was  that  shortly  be 
fore,  at  three  o'clock,  his  fate  had  practically  been 

4 


THE   PRINCE 

sealed,  and  that  even  when  one  pretended  to  no 
quarrel  with  it  the  moment  had  something  of  the 
grimness  of  a  crunched  key  in  the  strongest  lock  that 
could  be  made.  There  was  nothing  to  do  as  yet, 
further,  but  feel  what  one  bad  done,  and  our  person 
age  felt  it  while  he  aimlessly  wandered.  It  was  already 
as  if  he  were  married,  so  definitely  had  the  solicitors, 
at  three  o'clock,  enabled  the  date  to  be  fixed,  and  by  so 
few  days  was  that  date  now  distant.  He  was  to  dine 
at  half-past  eight  o'clock  with  the  young  lady  on  whose 
behalf,  and  on  whose  father's,  the  London  lawyers  had 
reached  an  inspired  harmony  with  his  own  man  of 
business,  poor  Calderoni,  fresh  from  Rome  and  now 
apparently  in  the  wondrous  situation  of  being  "shown 
London,"  before  promptly  leaving  it  again,  by  Mr. 
Verver  himself,  Mr.  Verver  whose  easy  way  with  his 
millions  had  taxed  to  such  small  purpose,  in  the  ar 
rangements,  the  principle  of  reciprocity.  The  reci 
procity  with  which  the  Prince  was  during  these  min 
utes  most  struck  was  that  of  Calderoni's  bestowal  of 
his  company  for  a  view  of  the  lions.  If  there  was  one 
thing  in  the  world  the  young  man  at  this  juncture 
clearly  intended  it  was  to  be  much  more  decent  as  a 
son-in-law  than  lots  of  fellows  he  could  think  of  had 
shown  themselves  in  that  character.  He  thought  of 
these  fellows,  from  whom  he  was  so  to  differ,  in  Eng 
lish;  he  used,  mentally,  the  English  term  to  describe 
his  difference,  for,  familiar  with  the  tongue  from  his 
earliest  years,  so  that  no  note  of  strangeness  remained 
with  him  either  for  lip  or  for  ear,  he  found  it  con 
venient,  in  life,  for  the  greatest  number  of  relations. 
He  found  it  convenient,  oddly,  even  for  his  relation 

5 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

with  himself — though  not  unmindful  that  there 
might  still,  as  time  went  on,  be  others,  including  a 
more  intimate  degree  of  that  one,  that  would  seek, 
possibly  with  violence,  the  larger  or  the  finer  issue 
—  which  was  it  ?  —  of  the  vernacular.  Miss  Verver 
had  told  him  he  spoke  English  too  well  —  it  was  his 
only  fault,  and  he  had  n't  been  able  to  speak  worse 
even  to  oblige  her.  "When  I  speak  worse,  you  see, 
I  speak  French,"  he  had  said;  intimating  thus  that 
there  were  discriminations,  doubtless  of  the  invidious 
kind,  for  which  that  language  was  the  most  apt. 
The  girl  had  taken  this,  she  let  him  know,  as  a  re 
flexion  on  her  own  French,  which  she  had  always 
so  dreamed  of  making  good,  of  making  better;  to  say 
nothing  of  his  evident  feeling  that  the  idiom  supposed 
a  cleverness  she  was  not  a  person  to  rise  to.  The 
Prince's  answer  to  such  remarks  —  genial,  charming, 
like  every  answer  the  parties  to  his  new  arrangement 
had  yet  had  from  him  —  was  that  he  was  practising 
his  American  in  order  to  converse  properly,  on  equal 
terms  as  it  were,  with  Mr.  Verver.  His  prospective 
father-in-law  had  a  command  of  it,  he  said,  that  put 
him  at  a  disadvantage  in  any  discussion;  besides 
which  he  —  well,  besides  which  he  had  made  to  the 
girl  the  observation  that  positively,  of  all  his  observa 
tions  yet,  had  most  finely  touched  her. 

"You  know  I  think  he's  a  real  galantuomo  — 
'and  no  mistake/  There  are  plenty  of  sham  ones 
about.  He  seems  to  me  simply  the  best  man  I  've  ever 
seen  in  my  life." 

"Well,  my  dear,  why  should  n't  he  be?"  the  girl 
had  gaily  enquired. 

6 


THE  PRINCE 

It  was  this  precisely  that  had  set  the  Prince  to 
think.  The  things,  or  many  of  them,  that  had  made 
Mr.  Verver  what  he  was  seemed  practically  to  bring 
a  charge  of  waste  against  the  other  things  that,  with 
the  other  people  known  to  the  young  man,  had  failed 
of  such  a  result.  "Why  his  'form,' "  he  had  returned, 
"might  have  made  one  doubt." 
.  "  Father's  form  ? "  She  had  n't  seen  it.  "It  strikes 
me  he  has  n't  got  any." 

"He  has  n't  got  mine  —  he  has  n't  even  got  yours." 

"Thank  you  for  'even'!"  the  girl  had  laughed  at 
him. 

"Oh  yours,  my  dear,  is  tremendous.  But  your 
father  has  his  own.  I  Ve  made  that  out.  So  don't 
doubt  it.  It 's  where  it  has  brought  him  out  —  that 's 
the  point." 

"It's  his  goodness  that  has  brought  him  out,"  our 
young  woman  had,  at  this,  objected. 

"Ah  darling,  goodness,  I  think,  never  brought  any 
one  out.  Goodness,  when  it's  real,  precisely,  rather 
keeps  people  in"  He  had  been  interested  in  his  dis 
crimination,  which  amused  him.  "No,  it's  his  way. 
It  belongs  to  him." 

But  she  had  wondered  still.  "It's  the  American 
way.  That's  all." 

"Exactly  —  it's  all.  It's  all  I  say!  It  fits  him  — 
so  it  must  be  good  for  something." 

"Do  you  think  it  would  be  good  foi  you?"  Maggie 
Verver  had  smilingly  asked. 

To  which  his  reply  had  been  just  of  the  happiest. 
"I  don't  feel,  my  dear,  if  you  really  want  to  know, 
that  anything  much  can  now  either  hurt  me  or  help 

7 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

me.  Such  as  I  am  —  but  you  '11  see  for  yourself. 
Say,  however,  I  am  a  galantuomo  —  which  I  de 
voutly  hope :  I  'm  like  a  chicken,  at  best,  chopped  up 
and  smothered  in  sauce;  cooked  down  as  a  creme  de 
volatile,  with  half  the  parts  left  out.  Your  father  's 
the  natural  fowl  running  about  the  bassecour.  His 
feathers,  his  movements,  his  sounds  —  those  are  the 
parts  that,  with  me,  are  left  out." 

"Ah  as  a  matter  of  course  —  since  you  can't  eat 
a  chicken  alive ! " 

The  Prince  had  n't  been  annoyed  at  this,  but  had 
been  positive.  "Well,  I  'm  eating  your  father  alive  — 
which  is  the  only  way  to  taste  him.  I  want  to  continue, 
and  as  it's  when  he  talks  American  that  he  is  most 
alive,  so  I  must  also  cultivate  it,  to  get  my  pleasure.  He 
could  n't  make  one  like  him  so  much  in  any  other 
language." 

It  mattered  little  that  the  girl  had  continued  to  de 
mur  —  it  was  the  mere  play  of  her  joy.  "I  think  he 
could  make  you  like  him  in  Chinese." 

"It  would  be  an  unnecessary  trouble.  What  I  mean 
is  that  he 's  a  kind  of  result  of  his  inevitable  tone.  My 
liking  is  accordingly  for  the  tone  —  which  has  made 
him  possible." 

"  Oh  you  '11  hear  enough  of  it,"  she  laughed,  "  be 
fore  you've  done  with  us." 

Only  this  in  truth  had  made  him  frown  a  little. 
"What  do  you  mean,  please,  by  my  having  'done' 
with  you  ? " 

"Why  found  out  about  us  all  there  is  to  find." 

He  had  been  able  to  take  it  indeed  easily  as  a  joke. 
"Ah  love,  I  began  with  that.  I  know  enough,  I  feel, 

8 


THE  PRINCE 

never  to  be  surprised.  It's  you  yourselves  mean 
while,"  he  continued,  "who  really  know  nothing. 
There  are  two  parts  of  me" — yes,  he  had  been  moved 
to  go  on.  "  One  is  made  up  of  the  history,  the  doings, 
the  marriages,  the  crimes,  the  follies,  the  boundless 
betises  of  other  people  —  especially  of  their  infamous 
waste  of  money  that  might  have  come  to  me.  Those 
things  are  written  —  literally  in  rows  of  volumes,  in 
libraries;  are  as  public  as  they're  abominable.  Every 
body  can  get  at  them,  and  you  've  both  of  you  won 
derfully  looked  them  in  the  face.  But  there 's  another 
part,  very  much  smaller  doubtless,  which,  such  as  it  is, 
represents  my  single  self,  the  unknown,  unimportant 

—  unimportant    save    to    you  —  personal    quantity. 
About  this  you  Ve  found  out  nothing." 

"Luckily,  my  dear,"  the  girl  had  bravely  said; 
"for  what  then  would  become,  please,  of  the  pro 
mised  occupation  of  my  future  ? " 

The  young  man  remembered  even  now  how  extra 
ordinarily  clear  —  he  could  n't  call  it  anything  else 

—  she  had  looked,  in  her  prettiness,  as  she  had  said 
it.    He  also  remembered  what  he  had  been  moved  to 
reply.     "The  happiest  reigns,  we  are  taught,  you 
know,  are  the  reigns  without  any  history." 

"Oh  I'm  not  afraid  of  history!"  She  had  been 
sure  of  that.  "Call  it  the  bad  part,  if  you  like  — yours 
certainly  sticks  out  of  you.  What  was  h  else,"  Mag 
gie  Verver  had  also  said,  "that  made  me  originally 
think  of  you  ?  It  was  n't  —  as  I  should  suppose  you 
must  have  seen  —  what  you  call  your  unknown  quan 
tity,  your  particular  self.  It  was  the  generations  be 
hind  you,  the  follies  and  the  crimes,  the  plunder  and 

9 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

the  waste  —  the  wicked  Pope,  the  monster  most  of 
all,  whom  so  many  of  the  volumes  in  your  family 
library  are  all  about.  If  I  've  read  but  two  or  three 
yet,  I  shall  give  myself  up  but  the  more  —  as  soon  as 
I  have  time  —  to  the  rest.  Where,  therefore  "  —  she 
had  put  it  to  him  again  —  "without  your  archives, 
annals,  infamies,  would  you  have  been  ? " 

He  recalled  what,  to  this,  he  had  gravely  returned. 
"I  might  have  been  in  a  somewhat  better  pecuniary 
situation."  But  his  actual  situation  under  the  head 
in  question  positively  so  little  mattered  to  them  that, 
having  by  that  time  lived  deep  into  the  sense  of  his 
advantage,  he  had  kept  no  impression  of  the  girl's 
rejoinder.  It  had  but  sweetened  the  waters  in  which 
he  now  floated,  tinted  them  as  by  the  action  of  some 
essence,  poured  from  a  gold-topped  phial,  for  making 
one's  bath  aromatic.  No  one  before  him,  never  — 
not  even  the  infamous  Pope  —  had  so  sat  up  to  his 
neck  in  such  a  bath.  It  showed  for  that  matter  how 
little  one  of  his  race  could  escape  after  all  from  his 
tory.  What  was  it  but  history,  and  of  their  kind  very 
much,  to  have  the  assurance  of  the  enjoyment  of  more 
money  than  the  palace-builder  himself  could  have 
dreamed  of?  This  was  the  element  that  bore  him 
up  and  into  which  Maggie  scattered,  on  occasion, 
her  exquisite  colouring  drops.  They  were  of  the 
colour  —  of  what  on  earth  ?  of  what  but  the  extra 
ordinary  American  good  faith  ?  They  were  of  the 
colour  of  her  innocence,  and  yet  at  the  same  time  of 
her  imagination,  with  which  their  relation,  his  and 
these  people's,  was  all  suffused.  What  he  had  further 
said  on  the  occasion  of  which  we  thus  represent  him 

10 


THE   PRINCE 

as  catching  the  echoes  from  his  own  thought  while 
he  loitered  —  what  he  had  further  said  came  back 
to  him,  for  it  had  been  the  voice  itself  of  his  luck,  the 
soothing  sound  that  was  always  with  him.  "You 
Americans  are  almost  incredibly  romantic." 

"Of  course  we  are.  That's  just  what  makes  every 
thing  so  nice  for  us." 

"Everything?"   He  had  wondered. 

"Well,  everything  that's  nice  at  all.  The  world, 
the  beautiful  world  —  or  everything  in  it  that  is 
beautiful.  I  mean  we  see  so  much." 

He  had  looked  at  her  a  moment  —  and  he  well 
knew  how  she  had  struck  him,  in  respect  to  the  beau 
tiful  world,  as  one  of  the  beautiful,  the  most  beauti 
ful  things.  But  what  he  had  answered  was:  "You 
see  too  much  —  that's  what  may  sometimes  make 
you  difficulties.  When  you  don't,  at  least,"  he  had 
amended  with  a  further  thought,  "see  too  little." 
But  he  had  quite  granted  that  he  knew  what  she  meant, 
and  his  warning  perhaps  was  needless.  He  had  seen 
the  follies  of  the  romantic  disposition,  but  there 
seemed  somehow  no  follies  in  theirs  —  nothing,  one 
was  obliged  to  recognise,  but  innocent  pleasures, 
pleasures  without  penalties.  Their  enjoyment  was  a 
tribute  to  others  without  being  a  loss  to  themselves. 
Only  the  funny  thing,  he  had  respectfully  submitted, 
was  that  her  father,  though  older  and  wiser,  and  a 
man  into  the  bargain,  was  as  bad  —  that  is  as  good 
• —  as  herself. 

"Oh  he's  better,"  the  girl  had  freely  declared  — 
"  that  is  he 's  worse.  His  relation  to  the  things  he  cares 
for  —  and  I  think  it  beautiful  —  is  absolutely  roman- 

II 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

tic.   So  is  his  whole  life  over  here  —  it 's  the  most  ro 
mantic  thing  I  know." 

"You  mean  his  idea  for  his  native  place?" 

"Yes  —  the  collection,  the  Museum  with  which  he 
wishes  to  endow  it,  and  of  which  he  thinks  more,  as 
you  know,  than  of  anything  in  the  world.  It's  the 
work  of  his  life  and  the  motive  of  everything  he  does." 

The  young  man,  in  his  actual  mood,  could  have 
smiled  again  —  smiled  delicately,  as  he  had  then 
smiled  at  her.  "Has  it  been  his  motive  in  letting 
me  have  you  ? " 

"Yes,  my  dear,  positively  —  or  in  a  manner," 
she  had  said.  "American  City  is  n't,  by  the  way,  his 
native  town,  for,  though  he 's  not  old,  it 's  a  young 
thing  compared  with  him  —  a  younger  one.  He 
I  .started  there,  he  has  a  feeling  about  it,  and  the 
place  has  grown,  as  he  says,  like  the  programme  of 
a  charity  performance.  You  're  at  any  rate  a  part 
of  his  collection,"  she  had  explained  —  "one  of  the 
things  that  can  only  be  got  over  here.  You  're  a  rarity, 
an  object  of  beauty,  an  object  of  price.  You're  not 
perhaps  absolutely  unique,  but  you  're  so  curious  and 
eminent  that  there  are  very  few  others  like  you — you 
belong  to  a  class  about  which  everything  is  known. 
You  're  what  they  call  a  morceau  de  musee" 

"I  see.  I  have  the  great  sign  of  it,"  he  had  risked 
—  "that  I  cost  a  lot  of  money." 

"  I  have  n't  the  least  idea,"  she  had  gravely  an 
swered,  "what  you  cost"  —  and  he  had  quite  adored 
for  the  moment  her  way  of  saying  it.  He  had  felt 
even  for  the  moment  vulgar.  But  he  had  made  the 
best  of  that. 

12 


THE  PRINCE 

"Would  n't  you  find  out  if  it  were  a  question  of 
parting  with  me  ?  My  value  would  in  that  case  be 
estimated." 

She  had  covered  him  with  her  charming  eyes,  as 
if  his  value  were  well  before  her.  "Yes,  if  you  mean 
that  I'd  pay  rather  than  lose  you." 

And  then  there  came  again  what  this  had  made  him 
say.  "  Don't  talk  about  me  —  it 's  you  who  are  not  of 
this  age.  You  're  a  creature  of  a  braver  and  finer  one, 
and  the  cinquecento,  at  its  most  golden  hour,  would  n't 
have  been  ashamed  of  you.  It  would  of  me,  and  if  I 
did  n't  know  some  of  the  pieces  your  father  has  ac 
quired  I  should  rather  fear  for  American  City  the 
criticism  of  experts.  Would  it  at;  all  events  be  your 
idea,"  he  had  then  just  ruefully  asked,  "to  send  me 
there  for  safety  ? " 

"Well,  we  may  have  to  come  to  it." 

"  I  '11  go  anywhere  you  want." 

"We  must  see  first  —  it  will  be  only  if  we  have  to 
come  to  it.  There  are  things,"  she  had  gone  on,  "that 
father  puts  away  —  the  bigger  and  more  cumbrous  of 
course,  which  he  stores,  has  already  stored  in  masses, 
here  and  in  Paris,  in  Italy,  in  Spain,  in  warehouses, 
vaults,  banks,  safes,  wonderful  secret  places.  We  've 
been  like  a  pair  of  pirates  —  positively  stage  pirates, 
the  sort  who  wink  at  each  other  and  say  'Ha-ha!' 
when  they  come  to  where  their  treasure  is  buried. 
Ours  is  buried  pretty  well  everywhere  —  except  what 
we  like  to  see,  what  we  travel  with  and  have  about  us. 
These,  the  smaller  pieces,  are  the  things  we  take  out 
and  arrange  as  we  can,  to  make  the  hotels  we  stay  at 
and  the  houses  we  hire  a  little  less  ugly.  Of  course  it 's 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

a  danger,  and  we  have  to  keep  watch.  But  father  loves 
a  fine  piece,  loves,  as  he  says,  the  good  of  it,  and  it 's 
for  the  company  of  some  of  his  things  that  he 's  willing 
to  run  his  risks.  And  we  've  had  extraordinary  luck  " 
—  Maggie  had  made  that  point ;  "  we  've  never  lost  any 
thing  yet.  And  the  finest  objects  are  often  the  small 
est.  Values,  in  lots  of  cases,  you  must  know,  have 
nothing  to  do  with  size.  But  there 's  nothing,  however 
tiny,"  she  had  wound  up,  "that  we've  missed." 

"I  like  the  class,"  he  had  laughed  for  this,  "in 
which  you  place  me !  I  shall  be  one  of  the  little  pieces 
that  you  unpack  at  the  hotels,  or  at  the  worst  in  the 
hired  houses,  like  this  wonderful  one,  and  put  out  with 
the  family  photographs  and  the  new  magazines.  But 
it's  something  not  to  be  so  big  that  I  have  to  be 
buried." 

"Oh,"  she  had  returned,  "you  shall  not  be  buried, 
my  dear,  till  you  're  dead.  Unless  indeed  you  call  it 
burial  to  go  to  American  City." 

"  Before  I  pronounce  I  should  like  to  see  my  tomb." 
So  he  had  had,  after  his  fashion,  the  last  word  in  their 
interchange,  save  for  the  result  of  an  observation  that 
had  risen  to  his  lips  at  the  beginning,  which  he  had 
then  checked,  and  which  now  came  back  to  him. 
"Good,  bad  or  indifferent,  I  hope  there's  one  thing 
you  believe  about  me." 

He  had  sounded  solemn  even  to  himself,  but  she 
had  taken  it  gaily.  "Ah  don't  fix  me  down  to  'one'! 
I  believe  things  enough  about  you,  my  dear,  to  have  a 
few  left  if  most  of  them  even  go  to  smash.  I  've  taken 
care  of  that.  I  Ve  divided  my  faith  into  water-tight 
compartments.  We  must  manage  not  to  sink." 

14 


THE   PRINCE 

"You  do  believe  I  'm  not  a  hypocrite  ?  You  recog 
nise  that  I  don't  lie  nor  dissemble  nor  deceive  ?  Is 
that  water-tight  ? " 

The  question,  to  which  he  had  given  a  certain  in 
tensity,  had  made  her,  he  remembered,  stare  an  in 
stant,  her  colour  rising  as  if  it  had  sounded  to  her  still 
stranger  than  he  had  intended.  He  had  perceived  on 
the  spot  that  any  serious  discussion  of  veracity,  of 
loyalty,  or  rather  of  the  want  of  them,  practically  took 
her  unprepared,  as  if  it  were  quite  new  to  her.  He 
had  noticed  it  before :  it  was  the  English,  the  Ameri 
can  sign  that  duplicity,  like  "love,"  had  to  be  joked 
about.  It  could  n't  be  "gone  into."  So  the  note  of  his 
enquiry  was  —  well,  to  call  it  nothing  else  —  prema 
ture;  a  mistake  worth  making,  however,  for  the  al 
most  overdone  drollery  in  which  her  answer  instinct 
ively  sought  refuge. 

"Water-tight  —  the  biggest  compartment  of  all? 
Why  it's  the  best  cabin  and  the  main  deck  and  the 
engine-room  and  the  steward's  pantry !  It 's  the  ship 
itself — it's  the  whole  line.  It's  the  captain's  table 
and  all  one's  luggage  —  one's  reading  for  the  trip." 
She  had  images,  like  that,  that  were  drawn  from  steam 
ers  and  trains,  from  a  familiarity  with  "  lines,"  a  com 
mand  of  "own  "cars,  from  an  experience  of  continents 
and  seas,  that  he  was  unable  as  yet  to  emulate;  from 
vast  modern  machineries  and  facilities  whose  acquaint 
ance  he  had  still  to  make,  but  as  to  which  it  was  part 
of  the  interest  of  his  situation  as  it  stood  that  he  could, 
quite  without  wincing,  feel  his  future  likely  to  bristle 
with  them. 

It  was  in  fact,  content  as  he  was  with  his  engage- 

15 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

nent  and  charming  as  he  thought  his  affianced  bride, 
his  view  of  that  furniture  that  mainly  constituted  our 
young  man's  "romance"  —  and  to  an  extent  that 
made  of  his  inward  state  a  contrast  that  he  was  intelli 
gent  enough  to  feel.  He  was  intelligent  enough  to  feel 
quite  humble,  to  wish  not  to  be  in  the  least  hard  or 
voracious,  not  to  insist  on  his  own  side  of  the  bargain, 
to  warn  himself  in  short  against  arrogance  and  greed. 
Odd  enough,  of  a  truth,  was  his  sense  of  this  last  dan 
ger  —  which  may  illustrate  moreover  his  general  atti 
tude  toward  dangers  from  within.  Personally,  he  con 
sidered,  he  had  n't  the  vices  in  question  —  and  that 
was  so  much  to  the  good.  His  race,  on  the  other  hand, 
had  had  them  handsomely  enough,  and  he  was  some 
how  full  of  his  race.  Its  presence  in  him  was  like  the 
consciousness  of  some  inexpugnable  scent  in  which  his 
clothes,  his  whole  person,  his  hands  and  the  hair  of  his 
head,  might  have  been  steeped  as  in  some  chemical 
bath :  the  effect  was  nowhere  in  particular,  yet  he  con 
stantly  felt  himself  at  the  mercy  of  the  cause.  He  knew 
his  antenatal  history,  knew  it  in  every  detail,  and  it 
was  a  thing  to  keep  causes  well  before  him.  What 
was  his  frank  judgement  of  so  much  of  its  ugliness,  he 
asked  himself,  but  a  part  of  the  cultivation  of  humil 
ity  ?  What  was  this  so  important  step  he  had  just 
taken  but  the  desire  for  some  new  history  that  should, 
so  far  as  possible,  contradict,  and  even  if  need  be 
flatly  dishonour,  the  old  ?  If  what  had  come  to  him 
would  n't  do  he  must  make  something  different.  He 
perfectly  recognised  —  always  in  his  humility  — 
that  the  material  for  the  making  had  to  be  Mr.  Ver- 
ver's  millions.  There  was  nothing  else  for  him  on 

16 


THE  PRINCE 

earth  to  make  it  with ;  he  had  tried  before  —  had  had 
to  look  about  and  see  the  truth.  Humble  as  he  was, 
at  the  same  time  he  was  not  so  humble  as  if  he  had 
known  himself  frivolous  or  stupid.  He  had  an  idea  — 
which  may  amuse  his  historian  —  that  when  you  were 
stupid  enough  to  be  mistaken  about  such  a  matter 
you  did  know  it.  Therefore  he  was  n't  mistaken  — 
his  future  might  be  scientific.  There  was  nothing  in 
himself  at  all  events  to  prevent  it.  He  was  allying 
himself  to  science,  for  what  was  science  but  the  ab 
sence  of  prejudice  backed  by  the  presence  of  money  ? 
His  life  would  be  full  of  machinery,  which  was  the 
antidote  to  superstition,  which  was  in  its  turn  too 
much  the  consequence,  or  at  least  the  exhalation, 
of  archives.  He  thought  of  these  things  —  of  his  not 
being  at  all  events  futile,  and  of  his  absolute  accept 
ance  of  the  developments  of  the  coming  age  —  to 
redress  the  balance  of  his  being  so  differently  con 
sidered.  The  moments  when  he  most  winced  were 
those  at  which  he  found  himself  believing  that,  really, 
futility  would  have  been  forgiven  him.  Even  with  it, 
in  that  absurd  view,  he  would  have  been  good  enough. 
Such  was  the  laxity,  in  the  Ververs,  of  the  romantic 
spirit.  They  did  n't,  indeed,  poor  dears,  know  what, 
in  that  line  —  the  line  of  futility  —  the  real  thing 
meant.  He  did  —  having  seen  it,  having  tried  it, 
having  taken  its  measure.  This  was  a  memory  in  fact 
simply  to  screen  out  —  much  as,  just  in  front  of  him 
while  he  walked,  the  iron  shutter  of  a  shop,  closing 
early  to  the  stale  summer  day,  rattled  down  at  the 
turn  of  some  crank.  There  was  machinery  again, 
just  as  the  plate  glass,  all  about  him,  was  money,  was 

17 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

power,  the  power  of  the  rich  peoples.  Well,  he  was 
o/them  now,  of  the  rich  peoples;  he  was  on  their  side 
—  if  it  was  n't  rather  the  pleasanter  way  of  putting 
it  that  they  were  on  his. 

Something  of  this  sort  was  in  any  case  the  moral  and 
the  murmur  of  his  walk.  It  would  have  been  ridicul 
ous  —  such  a  moral  from  such  a  source  —  if  it  had  n't 
all  somehow  fitted  to  the  gravity  of  the  hour,  that 
gravity  the  oppression  of  which  I  began  by  recording. 
Another  feature  was  the  immediate  nearness  of  the 
arrival  of  the  contingent  from  home.  He  was  to  meet 
them  at  Charing  Cross  on  the  morrow:  his  younger 
brother,  who  had  married  before  him,  but  whose  wife, 
of  Hebrew  race,  with  a  portion  that  had  gilded  the 
pill,  was  not  in  a  condition  to  travel;  his  sister  and  her 
husband,  the  most  anglicised  of  Milanesi,  his  mater 
nal  uncle,  the  most  shelved  of  diplomatists,  and  his 
Roman  cousin,  Don  Ottavio,  the  most  dispontble  of 
ex-deputies  and  of  relatives  —  a  scant  handful  of  the 
consanguineous  who,  in  spite  of  Maggie's  plea  for 
hymeneal  reserve,  were  to  accompany  him  to  the  altar. 
It  was  no  great  array,  yet  it  was  apparently  to  be  a 
more  numerous  muster  than  any  possible  to  the  bride 
herself,  she  having  no  wealth  of  kinship  to  choose  from 
and  not  making  it  up  on  the  other  hand  by  loose  invi 
tations.  He  had  been  interested  in  the  girl's  attitude 
on  the  matter  and  had  wholly  deferred  to  it,  giving 
him,  as  it  did,  a  glimpse,  distinctly  pleasing,  of  the 
kind  of  discriminations  she  would  in  general  be  gov 
erned  by  —  which  were  quite  such  as  fell  in  with  his 
own  taste.  They  had  n't  natural  relations,  she  and  her 
father,  she  had  explained ;  so  they  would  n't  try  to 

18 


THE  PRINCE 

supply  the  place  by  artificial,  by  make-believe  ones, 
by  any  searching  of  the  highways  and  hedges.  Oh 
yes,  they  had  acquaintances  enough  —  but  a  mar 
riage  was  an  intimate  thing.  You  asked  acquaint^ 
ances  when  you  had  your  kith  and  kin  —  you  asked 
them  over  and  above.  But  you  did  n't  ask  them  alone, 
to  cover  your  nudity  and  look  like  what  they  were  n't. 
She  knew  what  she  meant  and  what  she  liked,  and  he 
was  all  ready  to  take  it  from  her,  finding  a  good  omen 
in  both  of  the  facts.  He  expected  her,  desired  her,  to 
have  character;  his  wife  should  have  it,  and  he  was  nrt 
afraid  of  her  having  too  much.  He  had  had  in  his 
earlier  time  to  deal  with  plenty  of  people  who  had  had 
it;  notably  with  the  three  or  four  ecclesiastics,  his 
great-uncle  the  Cardinal  above  all,  who  had  taken  a 
hand  and  played  a  part  in  his  education  :  the  effect  of 
all  of  which  had  never  been  to  upset  him.  He  was 
thus  fairly  on  the  look-out  for  the  characteristic  in  this 
most  intimate,  as  she  was  to  become,  of  his  associates. 
He  encouraged  it  when  it  appeared. 

He  felt  therefore  just  at  present  as  if  his  papers 
were  in  order,  as  if  his  accounts  so  balanced  as  they 
had  never  done  in  his  life  before  and  he  might  close 
the  portfolio  with  a  snap.  It  would  open  again  doubt 
less  of  itself  with  the  arrival  of  the  Romans;  it  would 
even  perhaps  open  with  his  dining  to-night  in  Port 
land  Place,  where  Mr.  Verver  had  pitched  a  tent  sug 
gesting  that  of  Alexander  furnished  with  the  spoils  of 
Darius.  But  what  meanwhile  marked  his  crisis,  as  I 
have  said,  was  his  sense  of  the  immediate  two  or  three 
hours.  He  paused  on  corners,  at  crossings;  there  kept 
rising  for  him,  in  waves,  that  consciousness,  sharp  as 

19 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

to  its  source  while  vague  as  to  its  end,  which  I  began 
by  speaking  of —  the  consciousness  of  an  appeal  to  do 
something  or  other,  before  it  was  too  late,  for  himself. 
By  any  friend  to  whom  he  might  have  mentioned  it  the 
appeal  could  have  been  turned  to  frank  derision.  For 
what,  for  whom  indeed  but  himself  and  the  high  ad 
vantages  attached,  was  he  about  to  marry  an  extraor 
dinarily  charming  girl  whose  "prospects,"  of  the  solid 
sort,  were  as  guaranteed  as  her  amiability  ?  He 
was  n't  to  do  it  assuredly  all  for  her.  The  Prince,  as 
happened,  however,  was  so  free  to  feel  and  yet  not  to 
formulate  that  there  rose  before  him  after  a  little, 
definitely,  the  image  of  a  friend  whom  he  had  often 
found  ironic.  He  withheld  the  tribute  of  attention 
from  passing  faces  only  to  let  his  impulse  accumulate. 
Youth  and  beauty  made  him  scarcely  turn,  but  the 
image  of  Mrs.  Assingham  made  him  presently  stop  a 
hansom.  Her  youth,  her  beauty  were  things  more  or 
less  of  the  past,  but  to  find  her  at  home,  as  he  possibly 
might,  would  be  "doing"  what  he  still  had  time  for, 
would  put  something  of  a  reason  into  his  restlessness 
and  thereby  probably  soothe  it.  To  recognise  the  pro 
priety  of  this  particular  pilgrimage  —  she  lived  at  a 
due  distance,  in  long  Cadogan  Place  —  was  already  in 
fact  to  work  it  off  a  little.  A  perception  of  the  pro 
priety  of  formally  thanking  her,  and  of  timing  the  act 
just  as  he  happened  to  be  doing  —  this,  he  made  out 
as  he  went,  was  obviously  all  that  had  been  the  matter 
with  him.  It  was  true  that  he  had  mistaken  the  mood 
of  the  moment,  misread  it  rather,  superficially,  as  an 
impulse  to  look  the  other  way  —  the  other  way  from 
where  his  pledges  had  accumulated.  Mrs.  Assingham 

20 


THE  PRINCE 

exactly  represented  and  embodied  his  pledges  —  was 
n  her  pleasant   person  the  force  that  had  set  them 
.successively  in  motion.    She  had  made  his  marriage, 
quite  as  truly  as  his  papal  ancestor  had  made  his  fam-  A\  s 
ily  —  though  he  could  scarce  see  what  she  had  made  ' 
it  for  unless  because  she  too  was  perversely  romantic.  "T 
He  had  neither  bribed  nor  persuaded  her,  had  given 
her  nothing  —  scarce  even  till  now  articulate  thanks; 
so  that  her  profit  —  to  think  of  it  vulgarly  —  must 
have  all  had  to  come  from  the  Ververs. 

Yet  he  was  far,  he  could  still  remind  himself,  from 
supposing  that  she  had  been  grossly  remunerated. 
He  was  wholly  sure  she  had  n't;  for  if  there  were 
people  who  took  presents  and  people  who  did  n't  she 
would  be  quite  on  the  right  side  and  of  the  proud  class. 
Only  then,  on  the  other  hand,  her  disinterestedness 
was  rather  awful  —  it  implied,  that  is,  such  abysses 
of  confidence.  She  was  admirably  attached  to  Maggie 
— whose  possession  of  such  a  friend  might  moreover 
quite  rank  as  one  of  her  "  assets  " ;  but  the  great  proof 
of  her  affection  had  been  in  bringing  them,  with  her 
design,  together.  Meeting  him  during  a  winter  in 
Rome,  meeting  him  afterwards  in  Paris,  and  "liking" 
him,  as  she  had  in  time  frankly  let  him  know  from  the 
first,  she  had  marked  him  for  her  young  friend's  own 
and  had  then,  unmistakeably,  presented  him  in  a  light. 
But  the  interest  in  Maggie  —  that  was  the  point  — 
would  have  achieved  but  little  without  her  interest 
in  him.  On  what  did  that  sentiment,  unsolicited  and 
unrecompensed,  rest  ?  what  good,  again  —  for  it  was 
much  like  his  question  about  Mr.  Verver  —  should  he 
ever  have  done  her  ?  The  Prince's  notion  of  a  recom- 

21 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

pense  to  women  —  similar  in  this  to  his  notion  of  an 
appeal  —  was  more  or  less  to  make  love  to  them. 
Now  he  had  n't,  as  he  believed,  made  love  the  least 
little  bit  to  Mrs.  Assingham  —  nor  did  he  think  she 
had  for  a  moment  supposed  it.  He  liked  in  these  days 
to  mark  them  off,  the  women  to  whom  he  had  n't 
made  love :  it  represented  —  and  that  was  what 
pleased  him  in  it  —  a  different  stage  of  existence  from 
the  time  at  which  he  liked  to  mark  off  the  women  to 
whom  he  had.  Neither,  with  all  this,  had  Mrs.  Assing 
ham  herself  been  either  aggressive  or  resentful.  On 
what  occasion,  ever,  had  she  appeared  to  find  him 
wanting  ?  These  things,  the  motives  of  such  people, 
were  obscure  —  a  little  alarmingly  so;  they  contrib 
uted  to  that  element  of  the  impenetrable  which  alone 
slightly  qualified  his  sense  of  his  good  fortune.  He 
remembered  to  have  read  as  a  boy  a  wonderful  tale 
by  Allan  Poe,  his  prospective  wife's  countryman  — 
which  was  a  thing  to  show,  by  the  way,  what  imagina 
tion  Americans  could  have :  the  story  of  the  ship 
wrecked  Gordon  Pym,  who,  drifting  in  a  small  boat 
further  toward  the  North  Pole  —  or  was  it  the  South  ? 
—  than  any  one  had  ever  done,  found  at  a  given  mo 
ment  before  him  a  thickness  of  white  air  that  was  like 
a  dazzling  curtain  of  light,  concealing  as  darkness  con 
ceals,  yet  of  the  colour  of  milk  or  of  snow.  There  were 
moments  when  he  felt  his  own  boat  move  upon  some 
such  mystery.  The  state  of  mind  of  his  new  friends, 
including  Mrs.  Assingham  herself,  had  resemblances 
to  a  great  white  curtain.  He  had  never  known  cur 
tains  but  as  purple  even  to  blackness  —  but  as  pro 
ducing  where  they  hung  a  darkness  intended  and 

22 


THE  PRINCE 

ominous.   When  they  were  so  disposed  as  to  shelter 
surprises  the  surprises  were  apt  to  be  shocks. 

Shocks,  however,  from  these  quite  different  depths, 
were  not  what  he  saw  reason  to  apprehend ;  what  he 
rather  seemed  to  himself  not  yet  to  have  measured 
was  something  that,  seeking  a  name  for  it,  he  would 
have  called  the  quantity  of  confidence  reposed  in  him. 
He  had  stood  still,  at  many  a  moment  of  the  previous 
month,  with  the  thought,  freshly  determined  or  re 
newed,  of  the  general  expectation  —  to  define  it 
roughly  —  of  which  he  was  the  subject.  What  was 
singular  was  that  it  seemed  not  so  much  an  expecta 
tion  of  anything  in  particular  as  a  large  bland  blank 
assumption  of  merits  almost  beyond  notation,  of  es 
sential  quality  and  value.  It  was  as  if  Jie  had  been 
some  old  embossed  coin,  of  a  purity  of  gold  ho  longer 
used,  stamped  with  glorious  arms,  mediaeval,  wonder 
ful,  of  which  the  "worth"  in  mere  modern  change, 
sovereigns  and  half-crowns,  would  be  great  enough, 
but  as  to  which,  since  there  were  finer  ways  of  using  it, 
such  taking  to  pieces  was  superfluous.  That  was  the 
image  for  the  security  in  which  it  was  open  to  him 
to  rest ;  he  was  to  constitute  a  possession,  yet  was  to 
escape  being  reduced  to  his  component  parts.  What 
would  this  mean  but  that  practically  he  was  never  to  be 
tried  or  tested  ?  What  would  it  mean  but  that  if  they 
did  n't  "change"  him  they  really  would  n't  know — he 
would  n't  know  himself — how  many  pounds,  shillings 
and  pence  he  had  to  give  ?  These  at  any  rate  for  the 
present  were  unanswerable  questions ;  all  that  was  be 
fore  him  was  that  he  was  invested  with  attributes.  He 
was  taken  seriously.  Lost  there  in  the  white  mist  was 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

the  seriousness  mthem  that  made  them  so  take  him.  It 
was  even  in  Mrs.  Assingham,  in  spite  of  her  having,  as 
she  had  frequently  shown,  a  more  mocking  spirit.  All 
he  could  say  as  yet  was  that  he  had  done  nothing  so 
far  to  break  any  charm.  What  should  he  do  if  he  were 
to  ask  her  frankly  this  afternoon  what  was,  morall) 
speaking,  behind  their  veil.  It  would  come  to  asking 
what  they  expected  him  to  do.  She  would  answer  him 
probably :  "Oh,  you  know,  it 's  what  we  expect  you  tc 
be!"  on  which  he  would  have  no  resource  but  to  den) 
his  knowledge.  Would  that  dissipate  the  spell,  his  say 
ing  he  had  no  idea  ?  What  idea  in  fact  could  he  have  ? 
He  also  took  himself  seriously  —  made  a  point  of  it ; 
but  it  was  n't  simply  a  question  of  fancy  and  pre 
tension.  His  own  estimate  he  saw  ways,  at  one  time 
and  another,  of  dealing  with;  but  theirs,  sooner  or 
later,  say  what  they  might,  would  put  him  to  the 
practical  proof.  As  the  practical  proof,  accordingly, 
would  naturally  be  proportionate  to  the  cluster  of  his 
attributes,  one  arrived  at  a  scale  that  he  was  not,  hon 
estly,  the  man  to  calculate.  Who  but  a  billionaire 
could  say  what  was  fair  exchange  for  a  billion  ?  That 
measure  was  the  shrouded  object,  but  he  felt  really, 
as  his  cab  stopped  in  Cadogan  Place,  a  little  nearer 
the  shroud.  He  promised  himself  virtually  to  give  the 
latter  a  twitch. 


II 


"THEY'RE  not  good  days,  you  know,"  he  had  said 
to  Fanny  Assingham  after  declaring  himself  grateful 
for  finding  her,  and  then,  with  his  cup  of  tea,  putting 
her  in  possession  of  the  latest  news  —  the  documents 
signed  an  hour  ago,  de  part  et  d'autre,  and  the  telegram 
from  his  backers,  who  had  reached  Paris  the  morning 
before,  and  who,  pausing  there  a  little,  poor  dears, 
seemed  to  think  the  whole  thing  a  tremendous  lark. 
"We're  very  simple  folk,  mere  country  cousins  com 
pared  with  you,"  he  had  also  observed,  "and  Paris, 
for  my  sister  and  her  husband,  is  the  end  of  the  world. 
London  therefore  will  be  more  or  less  another  planet. 
It  has  always  been,  as  with  so  many  of  us,  quite  their 
Mecca,  but  this  is  their  first  real  caravan;  they've 
mainly  known  'old  England'  as  a  shop  for  articles  in 
india-rubber  and  leather,  in  which  they've  dressed 
themselves  as  much  as  possible.  Which  all  means, 
however,  that  you  '11  see  them,  all  of  them,  wreathed  in 
smiles.  We  must  be  very  easy  with  them.  Maggie's 
too  wonderful  —  her  preparations  are  on  a  scale !  She 
insists  on  taking  in  the  sposi  and  my  uncle.  The 
others  will  come  to  me.  I  've  been  engaging  their 
rooms  at  the  hotel,  and  with  all  those  solemn  signa 
tures  of  an  hour  ago  that  brings  the  case  home  to  me." 

"  Do  you  mean  you  're  afraid  ? "  his  hostess  had 
amusedly  asked. 

"Terribly  afraid.   I've  now  but  to  wait  to  see  the 

25 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

monster  come.  They're  not  good  days;  they're 
neither  one  thing  nor  the  other.  I  've  really  got  no 
thing,  yet  I  've  everything  to  lose.  One  does  n't  know 
what  still  may  happen." 

The  way  she  laughed  at  him  was  for  an  instant 
almost  irritating;  it  came  out,  for  his  fancy,  from 
behind  the  white  curtain.  It  was  a  sign,  that  is,  of  her 
deep  serenity,  which  worried  instead  of  soothing  him. 
And  to  be  soothed,  after  all,  to  be  tided  over,  in  his 
mystic  impatience,  to  be  told  what  he  could  under 
stand  and  believe  —  that  was  what  he  had  come  for. 
"  Marriage  then,"  said  Mrs.  Assingham,  "is  what  you 
call  the  monster  ?  I  admit  it 's  a  fearful  thing  at  the 
best;  but,  for  heaven's  sake,  if  that's  what  you're 
thinking  of,  don't  run  away  from  it." 

"Ah  to  run  away  from  it  would  be  to  run  away 
from  you,"  the  Prince  replied ;  "  and  I  've  already  told 
you  often  enough  how  I  depend  on  you  to  see  me 
through."  He  so  liked  the  way  she  took  this,  from  the 
corner  of  her  sofa,  that  he  gave  his  sincerity  —  for  it 
was  sincerity — fuller  expression.  "  I  'm  starting  on  the 
great  voyage  —  across  the  unknown  sea;  my  ship's 
all  rigged  and  appointed,  the  cargo 's  stowed  away  and 
the  company  complete.  But  what  seems  the  matter 
with  me  is  that  I  can't  sail  alone;  my  ship  must  be 
one  of  a  pair,  must  have,  in  the  waste  of  waters,  a 
—  what  do  you  call  it  ?  —  a  consort.  I  don't  ask  you 
to  stay  on  board  with  me,  but  I  must  keep  your  sail 
in  sight  for  orientation.  I  don't  in  the  least  myself 
know,  I  assure  you,  the  points  of  the  compass.  But 
with  a  lead  I  can  perfectly  follow.  You  must  be  my 
lead." 

26 


THE   PRINCE 

"  How  can  you  be  sure,"  she  asked,  "where  I  should 
take  you  ? " 

"Why  from  your  having  brought  me  safely  thus 
far.  I  should  never  have  got  here  without  you. 
You  've  provided  the  ship  itself,  and  if  you  've  not 
quite  seen  me  aboard  you've  attended  me  ever  so 
kindly  to  the  dock.  Your  own  vessel  is  all  conven 
iently  in  the  next  berth,  and  you  can't  desert  me  now." 

She  showed  him  again  her  amusement,  which  struck 
him  even  as  excessive,  as  if,  to  his  surprise,  he  made 
her  also  a  little  nervous;  she  treated  him  in  fine  as  if 
he  were  not  uttering  truths  but  making  pretty  figures 
for  her  diversion.  "My  vessel,  dear  Prince?"  she 
smiled.  "What  vessel  in  the  world  have  I?  This 
little  house  is  all  our  ship,  Bob's  and  mine  —  and 
thankful  we  are  now  to  have  it.  We  've  wandered  far, 
living,  as  you  may  say,  from  hand  to  mouth,  without 
rest  for  the  soles  of  our  feet.  But  the  time  has  come 
for  us  at  last  to  draw  in." 

He  made  at  this,  the  young  man,  an  indignant  pro 
test.  "  You  talk  about  rest  —  it 's  too  selfish !  —  when 
you  're  just  launching  me  on  adventures  ? " 

She  shook  her  head  with  her  kind  lucidity.  "Not 
adventures  —  heaven  forbid !  You  've  had  yours  — 
as  I  've  had  mine;  and  my  idea  has  been  all  along  that 
we  should  neither  of  us  begin  again.  My  own  last, 
precisely,  has  been  doing  for  you  all  you  so  prettily 
mention.  But  it  consists  simply  in  having  conducted 
you  to  rest.  You  talk  about  ships,  but  they  're  not  the 
comparison.  Your  tossings  are  over  —  you  're  prac 
tically  in  port.  The  port,"  she  concluded,  "of  the 
Golden  Isles." 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

He  looked  about,  to  put  himself  more  in  relation 
with  the  place;  then  after  an  hesitation  seemed  to 
speak  certain  words  instead  of  certain  others.  "Oh  I 
know  where  I  am —  !  I  do  decline  to  be  left,  but  what 
I  came  for  of  course  was  to  thank  you.  If  to-day  has 
seemed  for  the  first  time  the  end  of  preliminaries,  I 
feel  how  little  there  would  have  been  any  at  all  without 
you.  The  first  were  wholly  yours." 

"Well,"  said  Mrs.  Assingham,  "they  were  remark 
ably  easy.  I've  seen  them,  I've  had  them,"  she 
smiled,  "more  difficult.  Everything,  you  must  feel, 
went  of  itself.  So,  you  must  feel,  everything  still 
goes." 

The  Prince  quickly  agreed.  "Oh  beautifully!  But 
you  had  the  conception." 

"Ah  Prince,  so  had  you!" 

He  looked  at  her  harder  a  moment.  "You  had  it 
first.  You  had  it  most." 

She  returned  his  look  as  if  it  had  made  her  wonder. 
"I  liked  it,  if  that's  what  you  mean.  But  you  liked  it 
surely  yourself.  I  protest  that  I  had  easy  work  with 
you.  I  had  only  at  last  —  when  I  thought  it  was  time 
—  to  speak  for  you." 

"All  that's  quite  true.  But  you're  leaving  me  all 
the  same,  you  're  leaving  me  —  you  're  washing  your 
hands  of  me,"  he  went  on.  "However,  that  won't  be 
easy;  I  won't  be  left."  And  he  had  turned  his  eyes 
about  again,  taking  in  the  pretty  room  that  she  had 
just  described  as  her  final  refuge,  the  place  of  peace 
for  a  world-worn  couple,  to  which  she  had  lately  re 
tired  with  "Bob."  "I  shall  keep  this  spot  in  sight. 
Say  what  you  will  I  shall  need  you.  I'm  not,  you 

28 


THE  PRINCE 

know,"  he  declared,  "going  to  give  you  up  for  any 
body." 

"  If  you  're  afraid  —  which  of  course  you  're  not  — 
are  you  trying  to  make  me  the  same  ? "  she  asked 
after  a  moment. 

He  waited  a  minute  too,  then  answered  her  with  a 
question.  "  You  say  you  '  liked '  it,  your  undertaking 
to  make  my  engagement  possible.  It  remains  beauti 
ful  for  me  that  you  did;  it's  charming  and  unforget- 
able.  But  still  more  it's  mysterious  and  wonderful. 
Why,  you  dear  delightful  woman,  did  you  like  it  ? " 

"I  scarce  know  what  to  make,"  she  said,  "of  such 
an  enquiry.  If  you  have  n't  by  this  time  found  out 
yourself,  what  meaning  can  anything  I  say  have  for 
you  ?  Don't  you  really  after  all  feel,"  she  added  while 
nothing  came  from  him  —  "  are  n't  you  conscious 
every  minute  of  the  perfection  of  the  creature  of 
whom  I  've  put  you  into  possession  ? " 

"  Every  minute  —  gratefully  conscious.  But  that 's 
exactly  the  ground  of  my  question.  It  was  n't  only  a 
matter  of  your  handing  me  over  —  it  was  a  matter  of 
your  handing  her.  It  was  a  matter  of  her  fate  still 
more  than  of  mine.  You  thought  all  the  good  of  her 
that  one  woman  can  think  of  another,  and  yet,  by  your 
account,  you  enjoyed  assisting  at  her  risk." 

She  had  kept  her  eyes  on  him  while  he  spoke,  and 
this  was  what  visibly  determined  a  repetition  for  her. 
"Are  you  trying  to  frighten  me  ?" 

"Ah  that's  a  foolish  view — I  should  be  too  vulgar. 
You  apparently  can't  understand  either  my  good  faith 
or  my  humility.  I  'm  awfully  humble,"  the  young  man 
insisted;  "that's  the  way  I've  been  feeling  to-day, 

29 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

with  everything  so  finished  and  ready.  And  you  won't 
take  me  for  serious." 

She  continued  to  face  him  as  if  he  really  troubled 
her  a  little.  "Oh  you  deep  old  Italians!" 

"There  you  are,"  he  returned  —  "it's  what  I 
wanted  you  to  come  to.  That 's  the  responsible  note." 

"Yes,"  she  went  on  —  "if  you're  'humble'  you 
must  be  dangerous."  She  had  a  pause  while  he  only 
smiled ;  then  she  said :  "  I  don't  in  the  least  want  to 
lose  sight  of  you.  But  even  if  I  did  I  should  n't  think 
it  right." 

"Thank  you  for  that  —  it's  what  I  needed  of  you. 
I  'm  sure,  after  all,  that  the  more  you  're  with  me  the 
more  I  shall  understand.  It's  the  only  thing  in  the 
world  I  want.  I  'm  excellent,  I  really  think,  all  round 

—  except  that  I  'm  stupid.   I  can  do  pretty  well  any 
thing  I  see.  But  I  've  got  to  see  it  first."  And  he  pur 
sued  his  demonstration.    "I  don't  in  the  least  mind 
its  having  to  be  shown  me  —  in  fact  I  like  that  better. 
Therefore  it  is  that  I  want,  that  I  shall  always  want, 
your  eyes.  Through  them  I  wish  to  look — even  at  any 
risk  of  their  showing  me  what  I  may  n't  like.    For 
then,"  he  wound  up,  "  I  shall  know.   And  of  that  I 
shall  never  be  afraid." 

She  might  quite  have  been  waiting  to  see  what  he 
would  come  to,  but  she  spoke  with  a  certain  impa 
tience.  "What  on  earth  are  you  talking  about?" 

But  he  could  perfectly  say:  "Of  my  real  honest 
fear  of  being  'off'  some  day,  of  being  wrong,  without 
knowing  it.  That 's  what  I  shall  always  trust  you  for 

—  to  tell  me  when  I  am.  No  —  with  you  people  it 's  a 
sense.    We  have  n't  got  it  —  not  as  you  have.  There- 

30 


THE   PRINCE 

fore  — !"  But  he  had  said  enough.  "Ecco!"_he 
simply  smiled. 

It  was  not  to  be  concealed  that  he  worked  upon  her, 
but  of  course  she  had  always  liked  him.  "I  should 
be  interested,"  she  presently  remarked,  "to  see  some 
sense  you  don't  possess." 

Well,  he  produced  one  on  the  spot.  "The  moral, 
dear  Mrs.  Assingham.  I  mean  always  as  you  others 
consider  it.  I  've  of  course  something  that  in  our  poor 
dear  backward  old  Rome  sufficiently  passes  for  it. 
But  it's  no  more  like  yours  than  the  tortuous  stone 
staircase  —  half-ruined  into  the  bargain !  —  in  some 
castle  of  our  quattrocento  is  like  the  *  lightning  elevator ' 
in  one  of  Mr.  Verver's  fifteen-storey  buildings.  Your 
moral  sense  works  by  steam  —  it  sends  you  up  like  a 
rocket.  Ours  is  slow  and  steep  and  unlighted,  with 
so  many  of  the  steps  missing  that  —  well,  that  it's  as 
short  in  almost  any  case  to  turn  round  and  come  down 
again." 

"Trusting,"  Mrs.  Assingham  smiled,  "to  get  up 
some  other  way  ? " 

"Yes  —  or  not  to  have  to  get  up  at  all.  However," 
he  added,  "I  told  you  that  at  the  beginning." 

"  Machiavelli ! "  she  simply  exclaimed. 

"You  do  me  too  much  honour.  I  wish  indeed  I  had 
his  genius.  However,  if  you  really  believed  I  have 
his  perversity  you  would  n't  say  it.  But  it's  all  right," 
he  gaily  enough  concluded;  "I  shall  always  have  you 
to  come  to." 

On  this,  for  a  little,  they  sat  face  to  face;  after 
which,  without  comment,  she  asked  him  if  he  would 
have  more  tea.  All  she  would  give  him,  he  promptly 

31 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

signified;  and  he  developed,  making  her  laugh,  his 
idea  that  the  tea  of  the  English  race  was  somehow 
their  morality,  "made,"  with  boiling  water,  in  a  little 
pot,  so  that  the  more  of  it  one  drank  the  more  moral 
one  would  become.  His  drollery  served  as  a  transition, 
and  she  put  to  him  several  questions  about  his  sister 
and  the  others,  questions  as  to  what  Bob,  in  particu 
lar,  Colonel  Assingham,  her  husband,  could  do  for  the 
arriving  gentlemen,  whom,  by  the  Prince's  leave,  he 
would  immediately  go  to  see.  He  was  funny,  while 
they  talked,  about  his  own  people  too,  whom  he  de 
scribed,  with  anecdotes  of  their  habits,  imitations  of 
their  manners  and  prophecies  of  their  conduct,  as 
more  rococo  than  anything  Cadogan  Place  would  ever 
have  known.  This,  Mrs.  Assingham  professed,  was 
exactly  what  would  endear  them  to  her,  and  that  in 
turn  drew  from  her  visitor  a  fresh  declaration  of  all 
the  comfort  of  his  being  able  so  to  depend  on  her.  He 
had  been  with  her  at  this  point  some  twenty  minutes; 
but  he  had  paid  her  much  longer  visits,  and  he  stayed 
now  as  if  to  make  his  attitude  prove  his  appreciation. 
He  stayed  moreover  —  that  was  really  the  sign  of  the 
hour  —  in  spite  of  the  nervous  unrest  that  had  brought 
him  and  that  had  in  truth  much  rather  fed  on  the  scep 
ticism  by  which  she  had  apparently  meant  to  soothe  it. 
She  had  n't  soothed  him,  and  there  arrived  remark 
ably  a  moment  when  the  cause  of  her  failure  gleamed 
out.  He  had  n't  frightened  her,  as  she  called  it  —  he 
felt  that;  yet  she  was  herself  not  at  ease.  She  had  been 
nervous,  though  trying  to  disguise  it;  the  sight  of  him, 
following  on  the  announcement  of  his  name,  had 
shown  her  as  disconcerted.  This  conviction,  for  the 

32 


THE   PRINCE 

young  man,  deepened  and  sharpened;  yet  with  the 
effect  too  of  making  him  glad  in  spite  of  it.  It  was 
as  if,  in  calling,  he  had  done  even  better  than  he  in 
tended.  For  it  was  somehow  important  —  that  was 
what  it  was  —  that  there  should  be  at  this  hour  some 
thing  the  matter  with  Mrs.  Assingham,  with  whom,  in 
all  their  acquaintance,  so  considerable  now,  there  had 
never  been  the  least  little  thing  the  matter.  To  wait 
thus  and  watch  for  it  was  to  know  of  a  truth  that  there 
was  something  the  matter  with  him;  since — strangely, 
with  so  little  to  go  upon — his  heart  had  positively 
begun  to  beat  to  the  time  of  suspense.  It  fairly  befell 
at  last  for  a  climax  that  they  almost  ceased  to  pretend 
—  to  pretend,  that  is,  to  cheat  each  other  with  forms. 
The  unspoken  had  come  up,  and  there  was  a  crisis  — 
neither  could  have  said  how  long  it  lasted  —  during 
which  they  were  reduced,  for  all  interchange,  to  look 
ing  at  each  other  on  quite  an  inordinate  scale.  They 
might  at  this  moment,  in  their  positively  portentous 
stillness,  have  been  keeping  it  up  for  a  wager,  sitting 
for  their  photograph  or  even  enacting  a  tableau- 
vivant. 

The  spectator  of  whom  they  would  thus  well  have 
been  worthy  might  have  read  meanings  of  his  own  into 
the  intensity  of  their  communion  —  or  indeed,  even 
without  meanings,  have  found  his  account,  aesthet 
ically,  in  some  gratified  play  of  our  modern  sense  of 
type,  so  scantly  to  be  distinguished  from  our  modern 
sense  of  beauty.  Type  was  there,  at  the  worst,  in  Mrs. 
Assingham's  dark  neat  head,  on  which  the  crisp  black 
hair  made  waves  so  fine  and  so  numerous  that  she 
looked  even  more  in  the  fashion  of  the  hour  than  she 

33 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

desired.  Full  of  discriminations  against  the  obvious, 
she  had  yet  to  accept  a  flagrant  appearance  and  to 
make  the  best  of  misleading  signs.  Her  richness  of 
hue,  her  generous  nose,  her  eyebrows  marked  like 
those  of  an  actress  —  these  things,  with  an  added  anv 
plitude  of  person  on  which  middle  age  had  set  its  seal, 
seemed  to  present  her  insistently  as  a  daughter  of  the 
South,  or  still  more  of  the  East,  a  creature  formed  by 
hammocks  and  divans,  fed  upon  sherbets  and  waited 
upon  by  slaves.  She  looked  as  if  her  most  active  effort 
might  be  to  take  up,  as  she  lay  back,  her  mandolin,  or 
to  share  a  sugared  fruit  with  a  pet  gazelle.  She  was  in 
fact  however  neither  a  pampered  Jewess  nor  a  lazy 
Creole;  New  York  had  been  recordedly  her  birth 
place  and  "Europe"  punctually  her  discipline.  She 
wore  yellow  and  purple  because  she  thought  it  better, 
as  she  said,  while  one  was  about  it,  to  look  like  the 
Queen  of  Sheba  than  like  a  revendeuse;  she  put  pearls 
in  her  hair  and  crimson  and  gold  in  her  tea-gown  for 
the  same  reason :  it  was  her  theory  that  nature  itself 
had  overdressed  her  and  that  her  only  course  was  to 
drown,  as  it  was  hopeless  to  try  to  chasten,  the  over 
dressing.  So  she  was  covered  and  surrounded  with 
"things,"  which  were  frankly  toys  and  shams,  a  part 
of  the  amusement  with  which  she  rejoiced  to  supply 
her  friends.  These  friends  were  in  the  game  —  that 
of  playing  with  the  disparity  between  her  aspect  and 
her  character.  Her  character  was  attested  by  the  sec 
ond  movement  of  her  face,  which  convinced  the  be 
holder  that  her  vision  of  the  humours  of  the  world  was 
not  supine,  not  passive.  She  enjoyed,  she  needed  the 
warm  air  of  friendship,  but  the  eyes  of  the  American 

34 


THE   PRINCE 

city  looked  out,  somehow,  for  the  opportunity  of  it, 
from  under  the  lids  of  Jerusalem.  With  her  false  in 
dolence,  in  short,  her  false  leisure,  her  false  pearls  and 
palms  and  courts  and  fountains,  she  was  a  person  for 
whom  life  was  multitudinous  detail,  detail  that  left 
her,  as  it  at  any  moment  found  her,  unappalled  and 
unwearied. 

'^Sophisticated  as  I  may  appear  "  —  it  was  her  fre 
quent  phrase  —  she  had  found  sympathy  her  best  re 
source.  It  gave  her  plenty  to  do;  it  made  her,  as  she 
also  said,  sit  up.  She  had  in  her  life  two  great  holes 
to  fill,  and  she  described  herself  as  dropping  social 
scraps  into  them  as  she  had  known  old  ladies,  in  her 
early  American  time,  drop  morsels  of  silk  into  the 
baskets  in  which  they  collected  the  material  for  some 
eventual  patchwork  quilt.  One  of  these  gaps  in  Mrs. 
Assingham's  completeness  was  her  want  of  children; 
the  other  was  her  want  of  wealth.  It  was  wonderful 
how  little  either,  in  the  fulness  of  time,  came  to  show; 
sympathy  and  curiosity  could  render  their  objects 
practically  filial,  just  as  an  English  husband  who  in  his 
military  years  had  "  run  "  everything  in  his  regiment 
could  make  economy  blossom  like  the  rose.  Colonel 
Bob  had,  a  few  years  after  his  marriage,  left  the  army, 
which  had  clearly  by  that  time  done  its  laudable  all 
for  the  enrichment  of  his  personal  experience,  and  he 
could  thus  give  his  whole  time  to  the  gardening  in 
question.  There  reigned  among  the  younger  friends 
of  this  couple  a  legend,  almost  too  venerable  for  his 
torical  criticism,  that  the  marriage  itself,  the  happiest 
of  its  class,  dated  from  the  far  twilight  of  the  age,  a 
primitive  period  when  such  things — such  things  as 

35 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

American  girls  accepted  as  "good  enough  " — had  n't 
begun  to  be;  so  that  the  pleasant  pair  had  been, as  to 
the  risk  taken  on  either  side,  bold  and  original,  hon 
ourably  marked,  for  the  evening  of  life,  as  discoverers 
of  a  kind  of  hymeneal  Northwest  Passage.  Mrs.  As- 
singham  knew  better,  knew  there  had  been  no  historic 
hour,  from  that  of  Pocahontas  down,  when  some 
young  Englishman  had  n't  precipitately  believed  and 
some  American  girl  had  n't,  with  a  few  more  grada 
tions,  availed  herself  to  the  full  of  her  incapacity  to 
doubt;  but  she  accepted  resignedly  the  laurel  of  the 
founder,  since  she  was  in  fact  pretty  well  the  doyenne, 
above  ground,  of  her  transplanted  tribe,  and  since, 
above  all,  she  bad  invented  combinations,  though  she 
had  n't  invented  Bob's  own.  It  was  he  who  had  done 
that,  absolutely  puzzled  it  out  by  himself  from  its 
first  odd  glimmer  —  resting  upon  it  moreover, 
through  the  years  to  come,  as  proof  enough  in  him 
by  itself  of  the  higher  cleverness.  If  she  kept  her  own 
cleverness  up  it  was  largely  that  he  should  have  full 
credit.  There  were  moments  in  truth  when  she  pri 
vately  felt  how  little  —  striking  out  as  he  had  done  — 
he  could  have  afforded  that  she  should  show  the  com 
mon  limits.  But  Mrs.  Assingham's  cleverness  was  in 
truth  tested  when  her  present  visitor  at  last  said  to  her : 
"  I  don't  think,  you  know,  that  you  're  treating  me 
quite  right.  You've  something  on  your  mind  that 
you  don't  tell  me." 

It  was  positive  too  that  her  smile  of  reply  was  a 
trifle  dim.  "Am  I  obliged  to  tell  you  everything  I  have 
on  my  mind  ? " 

"  It  is  n't  a  question  of  everything,  but  it 's  a  ques- 

36 


THE  PRINCE 

tion  of  anything  that  may  particularly  concern  me. 
Then  you  should  n't  keep  it  back.  You  know  with 
what  care  I  desire  to  proceed,  taking  everything  into 
account  and  making  no  mistake  that  may  possibly 
injure  her" 

Mrs.  Assingham,  at  this,  had  after  an  instant  an  odd 
interrogation .  " '  Her '  ? " 

"Her  and  him.  Both  our  friends.  Either  Maggie 
or  her  father." 

"  I  have  something  on  my  mind,'*  Mrs.  Assingham 
presently  returned;  "something  has  happened  for 
which  I  had  n't  been  prepared.  But  it  is  n't  anything 
that  properly  concerns  you." 

The  Prince,  with  immediate  gaiety,  threw  back  his 
head.  "What  do  you  mean  by  'properly'?  I  some 
how  see  volumes  in  it.  It 's  the  way  people  put  a  thing 
when  they  put  it  —  well,  wrong.  /  put  things  right. 
What  is  it  that  has  happened  for  me?" 

His  hostess  had  the  next  moment  drawn  spirit  from 
his  tone.  "Oh  I  shall  be  delighted  if  you  '11  take  your 
share  of  it.  Charlotte  Stant  's  in  London.  She  has  just 
been  here." 

"  Miss  Stant  ?  Oh  really  ? "  The  Prince  expressed 
clear  surprise  —  a  transparency  through  which  his 
eyes  met  his  friend's  with  a  certain  hardness  of  con 
cussion.  "She  has  arrived  from  America?"  he  then 
quickly  asked. 

"She  appears  to  have  arrived  this  noon  —  coming 
up  from  Southampton  —  at  an  hotel.  She  dropped 
upon  me  after  luncheon  and  was  here  for  more  than  an 
hour." 

The  young  man  heard  with  interest,  though  not 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

with  an  interest  too  great  for  his  gaiety.  "You  think 
then  I  've  a  share  in  it  ?  What  is  my  share  ? " 

"Why  any  you  like  —  the  one  you  seemed  just  now 
eager  to  take.  It  was  you  yourself  who  insisted." 

He  looked  at  her  on  this  with  conscious  inconsist 
ency,  and  she  could  now  see  that  he  had  changed 
colour.  But  he  was  always  easy.  "  I  did  n't  know 
then  what  the  matter  was." 

"You  did  n't  think  it  could  be  so  bad  ?" 

"Do  you  call  it  very  bad  ?"  the  young  man  asked. 

"Only,"  she  smiled,  "because  that's  the  way  it 
seems  to  affect  you." 

He  hesitated,  still  with  the  trace  of  his  quickened 
colour,  still  looking  at  her,  still  adjusting  his  manner. 
"  But  you  allowed  you  were  upset." 

"To  the  extent — yes  —  of  not  having  in  the  least 
looked  for  her.  Any  more,"  said  Mrs.  Assingham, 
"than  I  judge  Maggie  to  have  done." 

The  Prince  thought;  then  as  if  glad  to  be  able  to  say 
something  very  natural  and  true :  "  No  —  quite  right. 
Maggie  has  n't  looked  for  her.  But  I  'm  sure,"  he 
added,  "she'll  be  delighted  to  see  her." 

"  That  certainly  "  —  and  his  hostess  spoke  with  a 
different  shade  of  gravity. 

"She'll  be  quite  overjoyed,"  the  Prince  went  on. 
"Has  Miss  Stant  now  gone  to  her?" 

"She  has  gone  back  to  her  hotel,  to  bring  her  things 
here.  I  can't  have  her,"  said  Mrs.  Assingham,  "  alone 
at  an  hotel." 

"No;  I  see." 

"  If  she 's  here  at  all  she  must  stay  with  me." 

He  quite  took  it  in.   "  So  she 's  coming  now  ? " 

38 


THE   PRINCE 

"  I  expect  her  at  any  moment.  If  you  wait  you  '11 
see  her." 

"Oh,"  he  promptly  declared  —  "charming!"  But 
this  word  came  out  as  if  a  little  in  sudden  substitution 
for  some  other.  It  sounded  accidental,  whereas  he 
wished  to  be  firm.  That  accordingly  was  what  he 
next  showed  himself.  "  If  it  was  n't  for  what 's  going 
on  these  next  days  Maggie  would  certainly  want  to 
have  her.  In  fact,"  he  lucidly  continued,  "isn't 
what 's  happening  just  a  reason  to  make  her  want  to  ? " 
Mrs.  Assingham,  for  answer,  only  looked  at  him,  and 
this  the  next  instant  had  apparently  had  more  effect 
than  if  she  had  spoken.  For  he  asked  a  question  that 
seemed  incongruous.  "What  has  she  come  for?" 

It  made  his  companion  laugh.  "Why,  for  just  what 
you  say.  For  your  marriage." 

"  Mine  ? "  —  He  wondered. 

"  Maggie 's  —  it 's  the  same  thing.  It 's  '  for '  your 
great  event.  And  then,"  said  Mrs.  Assingham,  "she's 
so  lonely." 

"Has  she  given  you  that  as  a  reason?" 

"  I  scarcely  remember  —  she  gave  me  so  many. 
She  abounds,  poor  dear,  in  reasons.  But  there's 
one  that,  whatever  she  does,  I  always  remember  for 
myself." 

"And  which  is  that  ? "  He  looked  as  if  he  ought  to 
guess  but  could  n't. 

"Why  the  fact  that  she  has  no  home  —  absolutely 
none  whatever.  She's  extraordinarily  alone." 

Again  he  took  it  in.  "And  also  has  no  great 
means." 

"  Very  small  ones.  Which  is  not  however,  with  the 

39 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

expense  of  railways  and  hotels,  a  reason  for  her  run 
ning  to  and  fro." 

"On  the  contrary.  But  she  does  n't  like  her  coun 
try." 

"Hers,  my  dear  man  ?  —  it's  little  enough  'hers.'  " 
The  attribution  for  the  moment  amused  his  hostess. 
"She  has  rebounded  now  —  but  she  has  had  little 
enough  else  to  do  with  it." 

"Oh  I  say  hers,"  the  Prince  pleasantly  explained, 
"very  much  as  at  this  time  of  day  I  might  say  mine. 
I  quite  feel,  I  assure  you,  as  if  the  great  place  already 
more  or  less  belonged  to  me" 

"That's  your  good  fortune  and  your  point  of  view. 
You  own  —  or  you  soon  practically  will  own  —  so 
much  of  it.  Charlotte  owns  almost  nothing  in  the 
world,  she  tells  me,  but  two  colossal  trunks  —  only 
one  of  which  I  've  given  her  leave  to  introduce  into 
this  house.  She  '11  depreciate  to  you,"  Mrs.  Assingham 
added,  "your  property." 

He  thought  of  these  things,  he  thought  of  every 
thing;  but  he  had  always  his  resource  at  hand  of  turn 
ing  all  to  the  easy.  "  Has  she  come  with  designs  upon 
me  ? "  And  then  in  a  moment,  as  if  even  this  were 
almost  too  grave,  he  sounded  the  note  that  had  least 
to  do  with  himself.  "  Est-elle  toujours  aussi  belle  ? " 
That  was  the  furthest  point,  somehow,  to  which  Char 
lotte  Stant  could  be  relegated. 

Mrs.  Assingham  treated  it  freely.  "Just  the  same. 
The  person  in  the  world,  to  my  sense,  whose  looks  are 
most  subject  to  appreciation.  It's  all  in  the  way  she 
affects  you.  One  admires  her  if  one  does  n't  happen 
not  to.  So,  as  well,  one  criticises  her." 

40 


THE   PRINCE 

"Ah  that's  not  fair!"  said  the  Prince. 

"To  criticise  her?  Then  there  you  are!  You're 
answered." 

"I'm  answered."  He  took  it,  humorously,  as  his 
lesson  —  sank  his  previous  self-consciousness,  with 
excellent  effect,  in  grateful  docility.  "I  only  meant 
that  there  are  perhaps  better  things  to  be  done  with 
Miss  Stant  than  to  criticise  her.  When  once  you  be 
gin  th  at,  with  anyone  — !"  He  was  vague  and  kind. 

"I  quite  agree  that  it's  better  to  keep  out  of  it  as 
long  as  one  can.  But  when  one  must  do  it  —  " 

"Yes?"  he  asked  as  she  paused. 

"Then  know  what  you  mean." 

"I  see.  Perhaps,"  he  smiled,  "/  don't  know  what 
I  mean." 

"Well,  it's  what,  just  now,  in  all  ways,  you  par 
ticularly  should  know."  Mrs.  Assingham  however 
made  no  more  of  this,  having  before  anything  else 
apparently  a  scruple  about  the  tone  she  had  just  used. 
"  I  quite  understand  of  course  that,  given  her  great 
friendship  with  Maggie,  she  should  have  wanted  to  be 
present.  She  has  acted  impulsively  —  but  she  has 
acted  generously." 

"She  has  acted  beautifully,"  said  the  Prince. 

"I  say  'generously'  because  I  mean  she  has  n't  in 
any  way  counted  the  cost.  She  '11  have  it  to  count  in  a 
manner  now,"  his  hostess  continued.  "But  that 
does  n't  matter." 

He  could  see  how  little.   "  You  '11  look  after  her." 

"I'll  look  after  her." 

"So  it's  all  right." 

"It's  all  right,"  said  Mrs.  Assingham. 

41 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"Then  why  are  you  troubled  ?" 

It  pulled  her  up  —  but  only  for  a  minute.  "  I  'm  not 

—  any  more  than  you." 

The  Prince's  dark  blue  eyes  were  of  the  finest  and, 
on  occasion,  precisely,  resembled  nothing  so  much  as 
the  high  windows  of  a  Roman  palace,  of  an  historic 
front  by  one  of  the  great  old  designers,  thrown  open 
on  a  feast-day  to  the  golden  air.  His  look  itself  at 
such  times  suggested  an  image  —  that  of  some  very 
noble  personage  who,  expected,  acclaimed  by  the 
crowd  in  the  street  and  with  old  precious  stuffs  falling 
over  the  sill  for  his  support,  had  gaily  and  gallantly 
come  to  show  himself:  always  moreover  less  in  his 
own  interest  than  in  that  of  spectators  and  subjects 
whose  need  to  admire,  even  to  gape,  was  periodically 
to  be  considered.  The  young  man's  expression  be 
came  after  this  fashion  something  vivid  and  concrete 

—  a  beautiful  personal  presence,  that  of  a  prince  in 
very  truth,  a  ruler,  warrior,  patron,  lighting  up  brave 
architecture  and  diffusing  the  sense  of  a  function.    It 
had  been  happily  said  of  his  face  that  the  figure  thus 
appearing  in  the  great  frame  was  the  ghost  of  some 
proudest  ancestor.   Whoever  the  ancestor  now,  at  all 
events,  the  Prince  was,  for  Mrs.  Assingham's  benefit, 
in  view  of  the  people.    He  seemed,  leaning  on  crim 
son  damask,  to  take  in  the  bright  day.    He  looked 
younger  than  his  years;  he  was  beautiful  innocent 
vague.    "Oh  well,  I'm  not!"  he  rang  out  clear. 

"  I  should  like  to  see  you,  sir ! "  she  said.  "  For  you 
would  n't  have  a  shadow  of  excuse."  He  showed  how 
he  agreed  that  he  would  have  been  at  a  loss  for  one, 
and  the  fact  of  their  serenity  was  thus  made  as  im- 

42 


THE  PRINCE 

portant  as  if  some  danger  of  its  opposite  had  directly 
menaced  them.  The  only  thing  was  that  if  the  evid 
ence  of  their  cheer  was  so  established  Mrs.  Assing- 
ham  had  a  little  to  explain  her  original  manner,  and 
she  came  to  this  before  they  dropped  the  question. 
"My  first  impulse  is  always  to  behave  about  every 
thing  as  if  I  feared  complications.  But  I  don't  fear 
them  —  I  really  like  them.  They  're  quite  my  ele 
ment." 

He  deferred  for  her  to  this  account  of  herself. 
"But  still,"  he  said,  "if  we're  not  in  the  presence  of 
a  complication." 

She  debated.  "A  handsome  clever  odd  girl  stay 
ing  with  one  is  always  a  complication." 

The  young  man  weighed  it  almost  as  if  the  question 
were  new  to  him.  "And  will  she  stay  very  long?" 

His  friend  gave  a  laugh.  "How  in  the  world  can 
I  know  ?  I  've  scarcely  asked  her." 

"Ah  yes.   You  can't." 

But  something  in  the  tone  of  it  amused  her  afresh. 
"Do  you  think  you  could  ?" 

"I?"  He  wondered. 

"  Do  you  think  you  could  get  it  out  of  her  for  me  — 
the  probable  length  of  her  stay  ? " 

He  rose  bravely  enough  to  the  occasion  and  the 
challenge.  "  I  dare  say  if  you  were  to  give  me  the 
chance." 

"Here  it  is  then  for  you,"  she  answered;  for  she 
had  heard,  within  the  minute,  the  stop  of  a  cab  at  her 
door.  "She's  back." 


Ill 


IT  had  been  said  as  a  joke,  but  as  after  this  they 
awaited  their  friend  in  silence  the  effect  of  the  silence 
was  to  turn  the  time  to  gravity — a  gravity  not  dissi 
pated  even  when  the  Prince  next  spoke.  He  had  been 
thinking  the  case  over  and  making  up  his  mind.  A 
handsome  clever  odd  girl  staying  with  one  was  a  com 
plication.  Mrs.  Assingham  so  far  was  right.  But 
there  were  the  facts  —  the  good  relations,  from  school 
days,  of  the  two  young  women,  and  the  clear  confid 
ence  with  which  one  of  them  had  arrived.  "She  can 
come,  you  know,  at  any  time,  to  us" 

Mrs.  Assingham  took  it  up  with  an  irony  beyond 
laughter.  "  You  'd  like  her  for  your  honeymoon  ? " 

"Oh  no,  you  must  keep  her  for  that.  But  why  not 
after?" 

She  had  looked  at  him  a  minute;  then  at  the  sound 
of  a  voice  in  the  corridor  they  had  got  up.  "Why 
not  ?  You  're  splendid ! " 

Charlotte  Stant,  the  next  minute,  was  with  them, 
ushered  in  as  she  had  alighted  from  her  cab  and  pre 
pared  for  not  finding  Mrs.  Assingham  alone  —  this 
would  have  been  to  be  noticed  —  by  the  butler's  an 
swer,  on  the  stairs,  to  a  question  put  to  him.  She  could 
have  looked  at  that  lady  with  such  straightness  and 
brightness  only  from  knowing  that  the  Prince  was 
also  there  —  the  discrimination  of  but  a  moment,  yet 
which  let  him  take  her  in  still  better  than  if  she  had 

44 


THE  PRINCE 

instantly  faced  him.  He  availed  himself  of  the  chance 
thus  given  him,  for  he  was  conscious  of  all  these 
things.  What  he  accordingly  saw  for  some  seconds 
with  intensity  was  a  tall  strong  charming  girl  who 
wore  for  him  at  first  exactly  the  air  of  her  adven 
turous  situation,  a  reference  in  all  her  person,  in  mo 
tion  and  gesture,  in  free  vivid  yet  altogether  happy 
indications  of  dress,  from  the  becoming  compactness 
of  her  hat  to  the  shade  of  tan  in  her  shoes,  to  winds 
and  waves  and  custom-houses,  to  far  countries  and 
long  journeys,  the  knowledge  of  how  and  where  and 
the  habit,  founded  on  experience,  of  not  being  afraid. 
He  was  aware  at  the  same  time  that  of  this  combina 
tion  the  "strong-minded"  note  was  not,  as  might  have 
been  apprehended,  the  basis;  he  was  now  sufficiently 
familiar  with  English-speaking  types,  he  had  sounded 
attentively  enough  such  possibilities,  for  a  quick 
vision  of  differences.  He  had  besides  his  own  view  of 
this  young  lady's  strength  of  mind.  It  was  great,  he 
had  ground  to  believe,  but  it  would  never  interfere 
with  the  play  of  her  extremely  personal,  her  always 
amusing  taste.  This  last  was  the  thing  in  her —  for 
she  threw  it  out  positively  on  the  spot  like  a  light  — 
that  she  might  have  reappeared,  during  these  mo 
ments,  just  to  cool  his  worried  eyes  with.  He  saw  her 
in  her  light :  that  immediate  exclusive  address  to  their 
friend  was  like  a  lamp  she  was  holding  aloft  for  his 
benefit  and  for  his  pleasure.  It  showed  him  every 
thing  —  above  all  her  presence  in  the  world,  so  closely, 
so  irretrievably  contemporaneous  with  his  own :  a 
sharp,  sharp  fact,  sharper  during  these  instants  than 
any  other  at  all,  even  than  that  of  his  marriage,  but 

45 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

accompanied,  in  a  subordinate  and  controlled  way, 
with  those  others,  facial,  physiognomic,  that  Mrs. 
Assingham  had  been  speaking  of  as  subject  to  appre 
ciation.  So  they  were,  these  others,  as  he  met  them 
again,  and  that  was  the  connexion  they  instantly  estab 
lished  with  him.  If  they  had  to  be  interpreted  this 
made  at  least  for  intimacy.  There  was  but  one  way 
certainly  for  him  —  to  interpret  them  in  the  sense  of 
the  already  known. 

Making  use  then  of  clumsy  terms  of  excess,  the 
face  was  too  narrow  and  too  long,  the  eyes  not  large, 
and  the  mouth  on  the  other  hand  by  no  means  small, 
with  substance  in  its  lips  and  a  slight,  the  very  slight 
est,  tendency  to  protrusion  in  the  solid  teeth,  other 
wise  indeed  well  arrayed  and  flashingly  white.  But 
it  was,  strangely,  as  a  cluster  of  possessions  of  his 
own  that  these  things  in  Charlotte  Stant  now  affected 
him;  items  in  a  full  list,  items  recognised,  each  of 
them,  as  if,  for  the  long  interval,  they  had  been 
"  stored  "  —  wrapped  up,  numbered,  put  away  in  a 
cabinet.  While  she  faced  Mrs.  Assingham  the  door 
of  the  cabinet  had  opened  of  itself;  he  took  the  relics 
out  one  by  one,  and  it  was  more  and  more  each  in 
stant  as  if  she  were  giving  him  time.  He  saw  again 
that  her  thick  hair  was,  vulgarly  speaking,  brown, 
but  that  there  was  a  shade  of  tawny  autumn  leaf  in 
it  for  "  appreciation  "  —  a  colour  indescribable  and 
of  which  he  had  known  no  other  case,  something  that 
gave  her  at  moments  the  sylvan  head  of  a  huntress. 
He  saw  the  sleeves  of  her  jacket  drawn  to  her  wrists, 
but  he  again  made  out  the  free  arms  within  them  to  be 
of  the  completely  rounded,  the  polished  slimness  that 


THE  PRINCE 

Florentine  sculptors  in  the  great  time  had  loved  and 
of  which  the  apparent  firmness  is  expressed  in  their 
old  silver  and  old  bronze.  He  knew  her  narrow  hands, 
he  knew  her  long  fingers  and  the  shape  and  colour  of 
her  finger-nails,  he  knew  her  special  beauty  of  move 
ment  and  line  when  she  turned  her  back,  and  the  per 
fect  working  of  all  her  main  attachments,  that  of  some 
wonderful  finished  instrument,  something  intently 
made  for  exhibition,  for  a  prize.  He  knew  above  all 
the  extraordinary  fineness  of  her  flexible  waist,  the 
stem  of  an  expanded  flower,  which  gave  her  a  like 
ness  also  to  some  long  loose  silk  purse,  well  filled  with 
gold-pieces,  but  having  been  passed  empty  through 
a  finger-ring  that  held  it  together.  It  was  as  if,  before 
she  turned  to  him,  he  had  weighed  the  whole  thing 
in  his  open  palm  and  even  heard  a  little  the  chink  of 
the  metal.  When  she  did  turn  to  him  it  was  to  recog 
nise  with  her  eyes  what  he  might  have  been  doing. 
She  made  no  circumstance  of  thus  coming  upon  him, 
save  so  far  as  the  intelligence  in  her  face  could  at  any 
moment  make  a  circumstance  of  almost  anything. 
If  when  she  moved  ofF  she  looked  like  a  huntress,  she 
looked  when  she  came  nearer  like  his  notion,  perhaps 
not  wholly  correct,  of  a  muse.  But  what  she  said  was 
simply :  "  You  see  you  're  not  rid  of  me.  How  is  dear 
Maggie  ? " 

It  was  to  come  soon  enough  by  the  quite  unforced 
operation  of  chance,  the  young  man's  opportunity  to 
ask  her  the  question  suggested  by  Mrs.  Assingham 
shortly  before  her  entrance.  The  licence,  had  he 
chosen  to  embrace  it,  was  within  a  few  minutes  all 
there —  the  licence  given  him  literally  to  enquire  of 

47 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

this  young  lady  how  long  she  was  likely  to  be  with 
them.  For  a  matter  of  the  mere  domestic  order  had 
quickly  determined  on  Mrs.  Assingham's  part  a  with 
drawal,  of  a  few  moments,  which  had  the  effect  of 
leaving  her  visitors  free.  "Mrs.  Betterman's  there  ?" 
she  had  said  to  Charlotte  in  allusion  to  some  member 
of  the  household  who  was  to  have  received  her  and 
seen  her  belongings  settled;  to  which  Charlotte  had 
replied  that  she  had  encountered  only  the  butler,  who 
had  been  quite  charming.  She  had  deprecated  any 
action  taken  on  behalf  of  her  effects;  but  her  hostess, 
rebounding  from  accumulated  cushions,  evidently 
saw  more  in  Mrs.  Betterman's  non-appearance  than 
could  meet  the  casual  eye.  What  she  saw  in  short 
demanded  her  intervention,  in  spite  of  an  earnest 
"  Let  me  go ! "  from  the  girl,  and  a  prolonged  smiling 
wail  over  the  trouble  she  was  giving.  The  Prince  was 
quite  aware  at  this  moment  that  departure,  for  him 
self,  was  indicated;  the  question  of  Miss  Stant's  in 
stallation  did  n't  demand  his  presence;  it  was  a  case 
for  one  to  go  away  —  if  one  had  n't  a  reason  for  stay 
ing.  He  had  a  reason,  however  —  of  that  he  was 
equally  aware;  and  he  had  n't  for  a  good  while  done 
anything  more  conscious  and  intentional  than  not 
quickly  to  take  leave.  His  visible  insistence  —  for  it 
came  to  that  —  even  demanded  of  him  a  certain  dis 
agreeable  effort,  the  sort  of  effort  he  had  mostly  asso 
ciated  with  acting  for  an  idea.  His  idea  was  there,  his 
idea  was  to  find  out  something,  something  he  wanted 
much  to  know,  and  to  find  it  out  not  to-morrow,  not 
at  some  future  time,  not  in  short  with  waiting  and 
wondering,  but  if  possible  before  quitting  the  place. 


THE  PRINCE 

This  particular  curiosity  moreover  confounded  itself 
a  little  with  the  occasion  offered  him  to  satisfy  Mrs. 
Assingham's  own ;  he  would  n't  have  admitted  that  he 
was  staying  to  ask  a  rude  question  —  there  was  dis 
tinctly  nothing  rude  in  his  'having  his  reasons.  It 
would  be  rude  for  that  matter  to  turn  one's  back 
without  a  word  or  two  on  an  old  friend. 

Well,  as  it  came  to  pass,  he  got  the  word  or  two,  for 
Mrs.  Assingham's  preoccupation  was  practically 
simplifying.  The  little  crisis  was  of  shorter  duration 
than  our  account  of  it;  duration  would  naturally  have 
forced  him  to  take  up  his  hat.  He  was  somehow  glad, 
on  finding  himself  alone  with  Charlotte,  that  he  had 
n't  been  guilty  of  that  inconsequence.  Not  to  be  flur 
ried  was  the  kind  of  consistency  he  wanted,  just  as 
consistency  was  the  kind  of  dignity.  And  why  could  n't 
he  have  dignity  when  he  had  so  much  of  the  good 
conscience,  as  it  were,  on  which  such  advantages 
rested  ?  He  had  done  nothing  he  ought  n't  —  he  had 
in  fact  done  nothing  at  all.  Once  more,  as  a  man  con 
scious  of  having  known  many  women,  he  could  as 
sist,  as  he  would  have  called  it,  at  the  recurrent,  the 
predestined  phenomenon,  the  thing  always  as  certain 
as  sunrise  or  the  coming  round  of  saints'  days,  the 
doing  by  the  woman  of  the  thing  that  gave  her  away. 
She  did  it,  ever,  inevitably,  infallibly  —  she  could  n't 
possibly  not  do  it.  It  was  her  nature,  it  was  her  life, 
and  the  man  could  always  expect  it  without  lifting  a 
finger.  This  was  his,  the  man's,  any  man's,  position 
and  strength  —  that  he  had  necessarily  the  advantage, 
that  he  only  had  to  wait  with  a  decent  patience  to  be 
placed,  in  spite  of  himself,  it  might  really  be  said,  in 

49 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

the  right.   Just  so  the  punctuality  of  performance  on 
the  part  of  the  other  creature  was  her  weakness  and 
her  deep  misfortune  —  not  less,  no  doubt,  than  her 
beauty.    It  produced  for  the  man  that  extraordinary 
mixture  of  pity  and  profit  in  which  his  relation  with 
her,  when  he  was  not  a  mere  brute,  mainly  consisted ; 
and  gave  him  in  fact  his  most  pertinent  ground  of 
being  always  nice  to  her,  nice  about  her,  nice  for  her. 
She  always  dressed  her  act  up,  of  course,  she  muffled 
and  disguised  and  arranged  it,  showing  in  fact  in  these 
dissimulations  a  cleverness  equal  to  but  one  thing  in 
the  world,  equal  to  her  abjection :  she  would  let  it  be 
known  for  anything,  for  everything,  but  the  truth  of 
which  it  was  made.  That  was  what,  exactly,  Charlotte 
Stant  would  be  doing  now;  that  was  the  present  mot 
ive  and  support,  to  a  certainty,  of  each  of  her  looks 
and  motions.   She  was  the  twentieth  woman,  she  was 
possessed  by  her  doom,  but  her  doom  was  also  to 
arrange  appearances,  and  what  now  concerned  him 
was  to  learn  how  she  proposed.   He  would  help  her, 
would  arrange  with  her  —  to  any  point  in  reason ;  the 
only  thing  was  to  know  what  appearance  could  best 
be  produced  and  best  be  preserved.    Produced  and 
preserved  on  her  part  of  course;  since  on  his  own  there 
had  been  luckily  no  folly  to  cover  up,  nothing  but  a 
perfect  accord  between  conduct  and  obligation. 

They  stood  there  together  at  all  events,  when  the 
door  had  closed  behind  their  friend,  with  a  conscious 
strained  smile  and  very  much  as  if  each  waited  for  the 
other  to  strike  the  note  or  give  the  pitch.  The  young 
man  held  himself,  in  his  silent  suspense  —  only  not 
more  afraid  because  he  felt  her  own  fear.  She  was 

50 


THE   PRINCE 

afraid  of  herself,  however;  whereas,  to  his  gain  of 
lucidity,  he  was  afraid  only  of  her.  Would  she  throw 
herself  into  his  arms  or  would  she  be  otherwise  won 
derful  ?  She  would  see  what  he  would  do  —  so  their 
queer  minute  without  words  told  him;  and  she  would 
act  accordingly.  But  what  could  he  do  but  just  let 
her  see  that  he  would  make  anything,  everything,  for 
her,  as  honourably  easy  as  possible  ?  Even  if  she 
should  throw  herself  into  his  arms  he  would  make 
that  easy  —  easy,  that  is,  to  overlook,  to  ignore,  not 
to  remember,  and  not  by  the  same  token  either  to 
regret.  This  was  not  what  in  fact  happened,  though 
it  was  also  not  at  a  single  touch,  but  by  the  finest 
gradations,  that  his  tension  subsided.  "It's  too  de 
lightful  to  be  back!"  she  said  at  last;  and  it  was  all 
she  definitely  gave  him- — being  moreover  nothing  but 
what  any  one  else  might  have  said.  Yet  with  two  or 
three  other  things  that,  on  his  response,  followed  it,  it 
quite  pointed  the  path,  while  the  tone  of  it,  and  her 
whole  attitude,  were  as  far  removed  as  need  have  been 
from  the  truth  of  her  situation.  The  abjection  that 
was  present  to  him  as  of  the  essence  quite  failed  to 
peep  out,  and  he  soon  enough  saw  that  if  she  was 
arranging  she  could  be  trusted  to  arrange.  Good  — 
it  was  all  he  asked;  and  all  the  more  that  he  could 
admire  and  like  her  for  it.  The  particular  appearance 
she  would,  as  they  said,  go  in  for  was  that  of  having 
no  account  whatever  to  give  him  —  it  would  be  in 
fact  that  of  having  none  to  give  anybody  —  of  reasons 
or  of  motives,  of  comings  or  of  goings.  She  was  a 
charming  young  woman  who  had  met  him  before, 
but  she  was  also  a  charming  young  woman  with  a  life 

51 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

of  her  own.  She  would  take  it  high  —  up,  up,  up, 
ever  so  high.  Well  then  he  would  do  the  same;  no 
height  would  be  too  great  for  them,  not  even  the  diz 
ziest  conceivable  to  a  young  person  so  subtle.  The 
dizziest  seemed  indeed  attained  when  after  another 
moment  she  came  as  near  as  she  was  to  come  to  an 
apology  for  her  abruptness. 

"  I  've  been  thinking  of  Maggie,  and  at  last  I 
yearned  for  her.  I  wanted  to  see  her  happy  —  and  it 
does  n't  strike  me  I  find  you  too  shy  to  tell  me  I  shall." 

"Of  course  she's  happy,  thank  God!  Only  it's 
almost  terrible,  you  know,  the  happiness  of  young 
good  generous  creatures.  It  rather  frightens  one. 
But  the  Blessed  Virgin  and  all  the  Saints,"  said  the 
Prince,  "have  her  in  their  keeping." 

"  Certainly  they  have.  She 's  the  dearest  of  the  dear. 
But  I  need  n't  tell  you,"  the  girl  added. 

"Ah,"  he  returned  with  gravity,  "I  feel  that  I've 
still  much  to  learn  about  her."  To  which  he  sub 
joined:  "She'll  rejoice  awfully  in  your  being  with 
us." 

"Oh you  don't  need  me!"  Charlotte  smiled.  "It's 
her  hour.  It's  a  great  hour.  One  has  seen  often 
enough,  with  girls,  what  it  is.  But  that,"  she  said, 
"  is  exactly  why.  Why  I  've  wanted,  I  mean,  not  to 
miss  it." 

He  bent  on  her  a  kind  comprehending  face.  "You 
must  n't  miss  anything."  He  had  got  it,  the  pitch,  and 
he  could  keep  it  now,  for  all  he  had  needed  was  to  have 
it  given  him.  The  pitch  was  the  happiness  of  his  wife 
that  was  to  be  —  the  sight  of  that  happiness  as  a  joy 
for  an  old  friend.  It  was,  yes,  magnificent,  and  not  the 

52 


THE   PRINCE 

less  so  for  its  coming  to  him  suddenly  as  sincere,  as 
nobly  exalted.  Something  in  Charlotte's  eyes  seemed 
to  tell  him  this,  seemed  to  plead  with  him  in  advance 
as  to  what  he  was  to  find  in  it.  He  was  eager  —  and 
he  tried  to  show  her  that  too  —  to  find  what  she  liked ; 
mindful  as  he  easily  could  be  of  what  the  friendship 
had  been  for  Maggie.  It  had  been  armed  with  the 
wings  of  young  imagination,  young  generosity;  it  had 
been,  he  believed  —  always  counting  out  her  intense 
devotion  to  her  father  —  the  liveliest  emotion  she  had 
known  before  the  dawn  of  the  sentiment  inspired  by 
himself.  She  had  n't,  to  his  knowledge,  invited  the 
object  of  it  to  their  wedding,  had  n't  thought  of  pro 
posing  to  her,  for  a  matter  of  a  couple  of  hours,  an 
arduous  and  expensive  journey.  But  she  had  kept  her 
connected  and  informed,  from  week  to  week,  in  spite 
of  preparations  and  absorptions.  "Oh  I  've  been  writ 
ing  to  Charlotte  —  I  wish  you  knew  her  better":  he 
could  still  hear,  from  recent  weeks,  this  record  of  the 
fact,  just  as  he  could  still  be  conscious,  not  otherwise 
than  queerly,  of  the  gratuitous  element  in  Maggie's 
wish,  which  he  had  failed  as  yet  to  indicate  to  her. 
Older  and  perhaps  more  intelligent,  at  any  rate,  why 
should  n't  Charlotte  respond  —  and  be  quite  free  to  re 
spond  —  to  such  fidelities  with  something  more  than 
mere  formal  good  manners  ?  The  relations  of  women 
with  each  other  were  of  the  strangest,  it  was  true,  and 
he  probably  would  n't  have  trusted  here  a  young  per 
son  of  his  own  race.  He  was  proceeding  throughout 
on  the  ground  of  the  immense  difference — difficult  in 
deed  as  it  might  have  been  to  disembroil  in  this  young 
person  her  race-quality.  Nothing  in  her  definitely 

53 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

placed  her;  she  was  a  rare,  a  special  product.  Her 
singleness,  her  solitude,  her  want  of  means,  that  is  her 
want  of  ramifications  and  other  advantages,  contrib 
uted  to  enrich  her  somehow  with  an  odd  precious 
neutrality,  to  constitute  for  her,  so  detached  yet  so 
aware,  a  sort  of  small  social  capital.  It  was  the  only 
one  she  had  —  it  was  the  only  one  a  lonely  gregarious 
girl  could  have,  since  few  surely  had  in  anything  like 
the  same  degree  arrived  at  it,  and  since  this  one  indeed 
had  compassed  it  but  through  the  play  of  some  gift  of 
nature  to  which  you  could  scarce  give  a  definite  name. 
It  was  n't  a  question  of  her  strange  sense  for 
tongues,  with  which  she  juggled  as  a  conjuror  at  a 
show  juggled  with  balls  or  hoops  or  lighted  brands  — 
it  was  n't  at  least  entirely  that,  for  he  had  known  peo 
ple  almost  as  polyglot  whom  their  accomplishment 
had  quite  failed  to  make  interesting.  He  was  polyglot 
himself,  for  that  matter  —  as  was  the  case  too  with  so 
many  of  his  friends  and  relations ;  for  none  of  whom 
more  than  for  himself  was  it  anything  but  a  com 
mon  convenience.  The  point  was  that  in  this  young 
woman  it  was  a  beauty  in  itself,  and  almost  a  mystery : 
so,  certainly,  he  had  more  than  once  felt  in  noting  on 
her  lips  that  rarest,  among  the  Barbarians,  of  all  civil 
graces,  a  perfect  felicity  in  the  use  of  Italian.  He  had 
known  strangers  —  a  few,  and  mostly  men  —  who 
spoke  his  own  language  agreeably;  but  he  had  known 
neither  man  nor  woman  who  showed  for  it  Charlotte's 
almost  mystifying  instinct.  He  remembered  how,  from 
the  first  of  their  acquaintance,  she  had  made  no  dis 
play  of  it,  quite  as  if  English,  between  them,  his  English 
so  matching  with  hers,  were  their  inevitable  medium. 

54 


THE  PRINCE 

He  had  perceived  all  by  accident  —  by  hearing  her 
talk  before  him  to  somebody  else  —  that  they  had 
an  alternative  as  good ;  an  alternative  in  fact  as  much 
better  as  the  amusement  for  him  was  greater  in 
watching  her  for  the  slips  that  never  came.  Her  ac 
count  of  the  mystery  did  n't  suffice :  her  recall  of  her 
birth  in  Florence  and  Florentine  childhood ;  her  par 
ents,  from  the  great  country,  but  themselves  already 
of  a  corrupt  generation,  demoralised  falsified  poly 
glot  well  before  her,  with  the  Tuscan  balia  who  was 
her  first  remembrance;  the  servants  of  the  villa,  the 
dear  contadini  of  the  podere,  the  little  girls  and  the 
other  peasants  of  the  next  podere,  all  the  rather  shabby 
but  still  ever  so  pretty  human  furniture  of  her  early 
time,  including  the  good  sisters  of  the  poor  convent 
of  the  Tuscan  hills,  the  convent  shabbier  than  almost 
anything  else,  but  prettier  too,  in  which  she  had  been 
kept  at  school  till  the  subsequent  phase,  the  phase  of 
the  much  grander  institution  in  Paris  at  which  Mag 
gie  was  to  arrive,  terribly  frightened  and  as  a  smaller 
girl,  three  years  before  her  own  ending  of  her  period 
of  five.  Such  reminiscences  naturally  gave  a  ground, 
but  they  had  n't  prevented  him  from  insisting  that 
some  strictly  civil  ancestor  —  generations  back,  and 
from  the  Tuscan  hills  if  she  would  —  made  himself 
felt  inefTaceably  in  her  blood  and  in  her  tone.  She 
knew  nothing  of  the  ancestor,  but  she  had  taken  his 
theory  from  him,  gracefully  enough,  as  one  of  the  little 
presents  that  make  friendship  flourish.  These  mat 
ters,  however,  all  melted  together  now,  though  a  sense 
of  them  was  doubtless  concerned,  not  unnaturally,  in 
the  next  thing,  of  the  nature  of  a  surmise,  that  his 

55 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

discretion  let  him  articulate.  "You  have  n't,  I  rather 
gather,  particularly  liked  your  country  ? "  They  would 
stick  for  the  time  to  their  English. 

"  It  does  n't,  I  fear,  seem  particularly  mine.  And  it 
does  n't  in  the  least  matter  over  there  whether  one 
likes  it  or  not — that  is  to  any  one  but  one's  self.  But 
I  did  n't  like  it,"  said  Charlotte  Stant. 

"That's  not  encouraging  then  to  me,  is  it?"  the 
Prince  went  on. 

"  Do  you  mean  because  you  're  going  ? " 

"  Oh  yes,  of  course  we  're  going.  I  've  wanted  im 
mensely  to  go." 

She  waited.   "  But  now  ?  —  immediately  ? " 

"  In  a  month  or  two  —  it  seems  to  be  the  new  idea." 
On  which  there  was  something  in  her  face  —  as  he 
imagined  —  that  made  him  say :  "  Did  n't  Maggie 
write  to  you  ? " 

"  Not  of  your  going  at  once.  But  of  course  you  must 
go.  And  of  course  you  must  stay  "  —  Charlotte  was 
easily  clear  —  "as  long  as  possible." 

"  Is  that  what  you  did  ? "  he  laughed.  "  You  stayed 
as  long  as  possible  ? " 

"Well,  it  seemed  to  me  so  —  but  I  had  n't  'inter 
ests.'  You  '11  have  them  —  on  a  great  scale.  It 's  the 
country  for  interests,"  said  Charlotte.  "If  I  had  only 
had  a  few  I  doubtless  would  n't  have  left  it." 

He  waited  an  instant;  they  were  still  on  their  feet. 
"  Yours  then  are  rather  here  ? " 

"Oh  mine!"  —  the  girl  smiled.  "They  take  up 
little  room,  wherever  they  are." 

It  determined  in  him,  the  way  this  came  from  her 
and  what  it  somehow  did  for  her  —  it  determined  in 

56 


THE  PRINCE 

him  a  speech  that  would  have  seemed  a  few  minutes 
before  precarious  and  in  questionable  taste.  The  lead 
she  had  given  him  made  the  difference,  and  he  felt  it 
as  really  a  lift  on  finding  an  honest  and  natural  word 
rise,  by  its  licence,  to  his  lips.  Nothing  surely  could  be, 
for  both  of  them,  more  in  the  note  of  a  high  bravery. 
"I  've  been  thinking  it  all  the  while  so  probable,  you 
know,  that  you  would  have  seen  your  way  to  marry- 
ing." 

She  looked  at  him  an  instant,  and  during  these  sec 
onds  he  feared  for  what  he  might  have  spoiled.  "To 
marrying  whom  ? " 

"Why  some  good  kind  clever  rich  American." 

Again  his  security  hung  in  the  balance  —  then  she 
was,  as  he  felt,  admirable.  "  I  tried  every  one  I  came 
across.  I  did  my  best.  I  showed  I  had  come,  quite 
publicly,  for  that.  Perhaps  I  showed  it  too  much.  At 
any  rate  it  was  no  use.  I  had  to  recognise  it.  No  one 
would  have  me."  Then  she  seemed  to  betray  regret 
for  his  having  to  hear  of  her  anything  so  disconcert 
ing.  She  pitied  his  feeling  about  it;  if  he  was  dis 
appointed  she  would  cheer  him  up.  "  Existence,  you 
know,  all  the  same,  does  n't  depend  on  that.  I  mean," 
she  smiled,  "on  having  caught  a  husband." 

"Oh  —  existence ! "  the  Prince  vaguely  commented. 

"  You  think  1  ought  to  argue  for  more  than  mere  ex 
istence  ? "  she  asked.  "  I  don't  see  why  my  existence  — 
even  reduced  as  much  as  you  like  to  being  merely  mine 
—  should  be  so  impossible.  There  are  things  of  sorts 
I  should  be  able  to  have  —  things  I  should  be  able  to 
be.  The  position  of  a  single  woman  to-day  is  very 
favourable,  you  know." 

57 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"Favourable  to  what?" 

"Why,  just  to  existence  —  which  may  contain  after 
all,  in  one  way  and  another,  so  much.  It  may  contain 
at  the  worst  even  affections;  affections  in  fact  quite 
particularly;  fixed,  that  is,  on  one's  friends.  I'm 
extremely  fond  of  Maggie  for  instance  —  I  quite  adore 
her.  How  could  I  adore  her  more  if  I  were  married 
to  one  of  the  people  you  speak  of  ? " 

The  Prince  gave  a  laugh.  "  You  might  adore  him 
more  — ! " 

"Ah  but  it  is  n't,  is  it,"  she  asked,  "a  question  of 
that  ? " 

"  My  dear  friend,"  he  returned,  "  it 's  always  a  ques 
tion  of  doing  the  best  for  one's  self  one  can  —  without 
injury  to  others."  He  felt  by  this  time  that  they  were 
indeed  on  an  excellent  basis;  so  he  went  on  again  as 
if  to  show  frankly  his  sense  of  its  firmness.  "  I  ven 
ture  therefore  to  repeat  my  hope  that  you'll  marry 
some  capital  fellow;  and  also  to  repeat  my  belief  that 
such  a  marriage  will  be  more  favourable  to  you,  as 
you  call  it,  than  even  the  spirit  of  the  age." 

She  looked  at  him  at  first  only  for  answer,  and 
would  have  appeared  to  take  it  with  meekness  had  n't 
she  perhaps  appeared  a  little  more  to  take  it  with 
gaiety.  "Thank  you  very  much,"  she  simply  said ;  but 
at  that  moment  their  friend  was  with  them  again.  It 
was  undeniable  that  as  she  came  in  Mrs.  Assingham 
looked  with  a  certain  smiling  sharpness  from  one  of 
them  to  the  other;  the  perception  of  which  was  per 
haps  what  led  Charlotte,  for  reassurance,  to  pass  the 
question  on.  "The  Prince  hopes  so  much  I  shall  still 
marry  some  good  person." 

58 


THE   PRINCE 

Whether  it  worked  for  Mrs.  Assingham  or  not  the 
Prince  was  himself,  at  this,  more  than  ever  reassured. 
He  was  safe,  in  a  word  —  that  was  what  it  all  meant; 
and  he  had  required  to  be  safe.  He  was  really  safe 
enough  for  almost  any  joke.  "  It 's  only,"  he  explained 
to  their  hostess,  "  because  of  what  Miss  Stant  has  been 
telling  me.  Don't  we  want  to  keep  up  her  courage  ? " 
If  the  joke  was  broad  he  had  n't  at  least  begun  it  — 
not,  that  is,  as  a  joke ;  which  was  what  his  companion's 
address  to  their  friend  made  of  it.  "She  has  been  try 
ing  in  America,  she  says,  but  has  n't  brought  it  off." 

The  tone  was  somehow  not  what  Mrs.  Assingham 
had  expected,  but  she  made  the  best  of  it.  "Well 
then,"  she  replied  to  the  young  man,  "if  you  take  such 
an  interest  you  must  bring  it  off." 

"And  you  must  help,  dear,"  Charlotte  said  unper 
turbed  —  "as  you've  helped,  so  beautifully,  in  such 
things  before."  With  which,  before  Mrs.  Assingham 
could  meet  the  appeal,  she  had  addressed  herself  to 
the  Prince  on  a  matter  much  nearer  to  him.  "Tour 
marriage  is  on  Friday?  — on  Saturday?" 

"Oh  on  Friday,  no!  For  what  do  you  take  us? 
There 's  not  a  vulgar  omen  we  're  neglecting.  On  Sat 
urday,  please,  at  the  Oratory,  at  three  o'clock  — be 
fore  twelve  assistants  exactly." 

"Twelve  including  me?" 

It  struck  him  — he  laughed.  "You'll  make  the 
thirteenth.  It  won't  do!" 

"Not,"  said  Charlotte,  "if  you're  going  in  for 
'omens.'  Should  you  like  me  stay  away?" 

"Dear  no  — we'll  manage.  We'll  make  the  round 
number  — we  '11  have  in  some  old  woman.  They  must 

59 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

keep  them  there  for  that,  don't  they  ?"  Mrs.  Assing- 
ham's  return  had  at  last  indicated  for  him  his  depart 
ure;  he  had  possessed  himself  again  of  his  hat  and  ap 
proached  her  to  take  leave.  But  he  had  another  word 
for  Charlotte.  "I  dine  to-night  with  Mr.  Verver. 
Have  you  any  message  ? " 

The  girl  seemed  to  wonder  a  little.  "For  Mr. 
Verver?" 

"For  Maggie  — about  her  seeing  you  early.  That, 
I  know,  is  what  she'll  like." 

"Then  I'll  come  early  — thanks." 

"I  dare  say,"  he  went  on,  "she'll  send  for  you.  I 
mean  send  a  carriage." 

"Oh  I  don't  require  that,  thanks.  I  can  go,  for 
a  penny,  can't  I  ?"  she  asked  of  Mrs.  Assingham,  "in 
an  omnibus." 

"Oh  I  say ! "  said  the  Prince  while  Mrs.  Assingham 
looked  at  her  blandly. 

"Yes,  love  — and  I  '11  give  you  the  penny.  She  shall 
get  there,"  the  good  lady  added  to  their  friend. 

But  Charlotte,  as  the  latter  took  leave  of  her, 
thought  of  something  else.  "There's  a  great  favour, 
Prince,  that  I  want  to  ask  of  you.  I  want,  between 
this  and  Saturday,  to  make  Maggie  a  marriage- 
present." 

"Oh  I  say!"  the  young  man  again  soothingly  ex 
claimed. 

"Ah  but  I  must"  she  went  on.  "It's  really  almost 
for  that  I  came  back.  It  was  impossible  to  get  in 
America  what  I  wanted." 

Mrs.  Assingham  showed  anxiety.  "What  is  it  then, 
dear,  you  want  ? " 

60 


THE  PRINCE 

But  the  girl  looked  only  at  their  companion. 
"That's  what  the  Prince,  if  he'll  be  so  good,  must 
help  me  to  decide." 

"Can't  /,"  Mrs.  Assingham  asked,  "help  you  to 
decide?" 

"Certainly,  darling,  we  must  talk  it  well  over." 
And  she  kept  her  eyes  on  the  Prince.  "But  I  want 
him,  if  he  kindly  will,  to  go  with  me  to  look.  I  want 
him  to  judge  with  me  and  choose.  That,  if  you  can 
spare  the  hour,"  she  said, "  is  the  great  favour  I  mean." 

He  raised  his  eyebrows  at  her  —  he  wonderfully 
smiled.  "What  you  came  back  from  America  to  ask  ? 
Ah  certainly  then  I  must  find  the  hour!"  He  won 
derfully  smiled,  but  it  was  after  all  rather  more  than 
he  had  been  reckoning  with.  It  went  somehow  so 
little  with  the  rest  that,  directly,  for  him,  it  was  n't  the 
note  of  safety;  it  preserved  this  character,  at  the  best, 
but  by  being  the  note  of  publicity.  Quickly,  quickly, 
however,  the  note  of  publicity  struck  him  as  better 
than  any  other.  In  another  moment  even  it  seemed 
positively  what  he  wanted;  for  what  so  much  as  pub 
licity  put  their  relation  on  the  right  footing  ?  By  this 
appeal  to  Mrs.  Assingham  it  was  established  as  right, 
and  she  immediately  showed  that  such  was  her  own 
understanding. 

"Certainly,  Prince,"  she  laughed,  "you  must  find 
the  hour ! "  And  it  was  really  so  express  a  licence  from 
her,  as  representing  friendly  judgement,  public  opin 
ion,  the  moral  law,  the  margin  allowed  a  husband 
about  to  be,  or  whatever,  that,  after  observing  to 
Charlotte  that  should  she  come  to  Portland  Place  in 
the  morning  he  would  make  a  point  of  being  there  to 

61 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

see  her  and  so  arrange  easily  with  her  about  a  time,  he 
took  his  departure  with  the  absolutely  confirmed  im 
pression  of  knowing,  as  he  put  it  to  himself,  where  he 
was.  Which  was  what  he  had  prolonged  his  visit  for. 
He  was  where  he  could  stay. 


IV 


"  I  DON'T  quite  see,  my  dear,"  Colonel  Assingham  said 
to  his  wife  the  night  of  Charlotte's  arrival — "I  don't 
quite  see,  I  'm  bound  to  say,  why  you  take  it,  even  at 
the  worst,  so  ferociously  hard.  It  is  n't  your  fault, 
after  all,  is  it  ?  I  '11  be  hanged  at  any  rate  if  it 's  mine." 
The  hour  was  late,  and  the  young  lady  who  had  dis 
embarked  at  Southampton  that  morning  to  come  up 
by  the  "steamer  special,"  and  who  had  then  settled 
herself  at  an  hotel  only  to  re-settle  herself  a  couple  of 
hours  later  at  a  private  house,  was  by  this  time,  they 
might  hope,  peacefully  resting  from  her  exploits. 
There  had  been  two  men  at  dinner,  rather  battered 
brothers-in-arms,  of  his  own  period,  casually  picked 
up  by  her  host  the  day  before,  and  when  the  gentle 
men,  after  the  meal,  rejoined  the  ladies  in  the  drawing- 
room,  Charlotte,  pleading  fatigue,  had  already  ex 
cused  herself.  The  beguiled  warriors  however  had 
stayed  till  after  eleven  —  Mrs.  Assingham,  though 
finally  quite  without  illusions,  as  she  said,  about  the 
military  character,  was  always  mistress  of  a  spell  to 
old  soldiers;  and  as  the  Colonel  had  come  in  before 
dinner  only  in  time  to  dress  he  had  n't  till  this  moment 
really  been  summoned  to  meet  his  companion  over  the 
situation  that,  as  he  was  now  to  learn,  their  visitor's 
advent  had  created  for  them.  It  was  actually  more 
than  midnight,  the  servants  had  been  sent  to  bed,  the 
rattle  of  the  wheels  had  ceased  to  come  in  through  a 

63 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

window  still  open  to  the  August  air,  and  Robert  As- 
singham  had  been  steadily  learning  all  the  while  what 
it  thus  behoved  him  to  know.  But  the  words  just 
quoted  from  him  presented  themselves  for  the  moment 
as  the  essence  of  his  spirit  and  his  attitude.  He  disen 
gaged,  he  would  be  damned  if  he  did  n't  —  they  were 
both  phrases  he  repeatedly  used  —  his  responsibility. 
The  simplest,  the  sanest,  the  most  obliging  of  men,  he 
habitually  indulged  in  extravagant  language.  His 
wife  had  once  told  him,  in  relation  to  his  violence  of 
speech,  that  such  excesses  on  his  part  made  her  think 
of  a  retired  General  whom  she  had  once  seen  playing 
with  toy  soldiers,  fighting  and  winning  battles,  carry 
ing  on  sieges  and  annihilating  enemies  with  little  fort 
resses  of  wood  and  little  armies  of  tin.  Her  husband's 
exaggerated  emphasis  was  his  box  of  toy  soldiers,  his 
military  game.  It  harmlessly  gratified  in  him,  for  his 
declining  years,  the  military  instinct;  bad  words,  when 
sufficiently  numerous  and  arrayed  in  their  might, 
could  represent  battalions,  squadrons,  tremendous 
cannonades  and  glorious  charges  of  cavalry.  It  was 
natural,  it  was  delightful  —  the  romance,  and  for  her 
as  well,  of  camp  life  and  of  the  perpetual  booming  of 
guns.  It  was  fighting  to  the  end,  to  the  death,  but  no 
one  was  ever  killed. 

Less  fortunate  than  she,  nevertheless,  in  spite  of  his 
wealth  of  expression,  he  had  n't  yet  found  the  image 
that  described  her  favourite  game ;  all  he  could  do  was 
practically  to  leave  it  to  her,  emulating  her  own  phil 
osophy.  He  had  again  and  again  sat  up  late  to  discuss 
those  situations  in  which  her  finer  consciousness 
abounded,  but  he  had  never  failed  to  deny  that  any- 


THE  PRINCE 

thing  in  life,  anything  of  hers,  could  be  a  situation  for 
himself.  She  might  be  in  fifty  at  once  if  she  liked  — 
and  it  was  what  women  did  like,  at  their  ease,  after 
all;  there  always  being,  when  they  had  too  much  of 
any,  some  man,  as  they  were  well  aware,  to  get  them 
out.  He  would  n't  at  any  price  have  one,  of  any  sort 
whatever,  of  his  own,  or  even  be  in  one  along  with  her. 
He  watched  her  accordingly  in  her  favourite  element 
very  much  as  he  had  sometimes  watched  at  the  Aqua 
rium  the  celebrated  lady  who,  in  a  slight,  though 
tight,  bathing-suit,  turned  somersaults  and  did  tricks 
in  the  tank  of  water  which  looked  so  cold  and  uncom 
fortable  to  the  non-amphibious.  He  listened  to  his 
companion  to-night,  while  he  smoked  his  last  pipe,  he 
watched  her  through  her  demonstration,  quite  as  if 
he  had  paid  a  shilling.  But  it  was  true  that,  this  being 
the  case,  he  desired  the  value  of  his  money.  What 
was  it,  in  the  name  of  wonder,  that  she  was  so  bent  on 
being  responsible  for?  What  did  she  pretend  was 
going  to  happen,  and  what,  at  the  worst,  could  the 
poor  girl  do,  even  granting  she  wanted  to  do  anything  ? 
What  at  the  worst  for  that  matter  could  she  be  con 
ceived  to  have  in  her  head  ? 

"  If  she  had  told  me  the  moment  she  got  here,"  Mrs. 
Assingham  replied,  "  I  should  n't  have  my  difficulty  in 
finding  out.  But  she  was  n't  so  obliging,  and  I  see  no 
sign  at  all  of  her  becoming  so.  What's  certain  is  that 
she  did  n't  come  for  nothing.  She  wants "  —  she 
worked  it  out  at  her  leisure  — "to  see  the  Prince  again. 
That  is  n't  what  troubles  me.  I  mean  that  such  a  fact, 
as  a  fact,  is  n't.  But  what  I  ask  myself  is  What  does 
she  want  it  for  ?  " 

65 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"What's  the  good  of  asking  yourself  if  you  know 
you  don't  know  ? "  The  Colonel  sat  back  at  his  own 
ease,  an  ankle  resting  on  the  other  knee  and  his  eyes 
attentive  to  the  good  appearance  of  an  extremely 
slender  foot  which  he  kept  jerking  in  its  neat  integu 
ment  of  fine-spun  black  silk  and  patent  leather.  It 
seemed  to  confess,  this  member,  to  consciousness  of 
military  discipline,  everything  about  it  being  as  pol 
ished  and  perfect,  as  straight  and  tight  and  trim,  as  a 
soldier  on  parade.  It  went  so  far  as  to  imply  that  some 
one  or  other  would  have  "got"  something  or  other, 
confinement  to  barracks  or  suppression  of  pay,  if  it 
had  n't  been  just  as  it  was.  Bob  Assingham  was  dis 
tinguished  altogether  by  a  leanness  of  person,  a  lean 
ness  quite  distinct  from  physical  laxity,  which  might 
have  been  determined  on  the  part  of  superior  powers 
by  views  of  transport  and  accommodation,  and  which 
in  fact  verged  on  the  abnormal.  He  "did"  himself 
as  well  as  his  friends  mostly  knew,  yet  remained  hun 
grily  thin,  with  facial,  with  abdominal  cavities  quite 
grim  in  their  effect,  and  with  a  consequent  looseness 
of  apparel  that,  combined  with  a  choice  of  queer  light 
shades  and  of  strange  straw-like  textures,  of  the  aspect 
of  Chinese  mats,  provocative  of  wonder  at  his  sources 
of  supply,  suggested  the  habit  of  tropic  islands,  a  con 
tinual  cane-bottomed  chair,  a  governorship  exercised 
on  wide  verandahs.  His  smooth  round  head,  with  the 
particular  shade  of  its  white  hair,  was  like  a  silver  pot 
reversed ;  his  cheekbones  and  the  bristle  of  his  mous 
tache  were  worthy  of  Attila  the  Hun.  The  hollows 
of  his  eyes  were  deep  and  darksome,  but  the  eyes 
within  them  were  like  little  blue  flowers  plucked  that 

66 


THE   PRINCE 

morning.  He  knew  everything  that  could  be  known 
about  life,  which  he  regarded  as,  for  far  the  greater 
part,  a  matter  of  pecuniary  arrangement.  His  wife 
accused  him  of  a  want  alike  of  moral  and  of  intel 
lectual  reaction,  or  rather  indeed  of  a  complete  inca 
pacity  for  either.  He  never  went  even  so  far  as  to 
understand  what  she  meant,  and  it  did  n't  at  all  mat 
ter,  since  he  could  be  in  spite  of  the  limitation  a  per 
fectly  social  creature.  The  infirmities,  the  predica 
ments  of  men  neither  surprised  nor  shocked  him,  and 
indeed  —  which  was  perhaps  his  only  real  loss  in  a 
thrifty  career  —  scarce  even  amused ;  he  took  them  for 
granted  without  horror,  classifying  them  after  their 
kind  and  calculating  results  and  chances.  He  might  in 
old  bewildering  climates,  in  old  campaigns  of  cruelty 
and  licence,  have  had  such  revelations  and  known 
such  amazements  that  he  had  nothing  more  to  learn. 
But  he  was  wholly  content,  despite  his  fondness,  in 
domestic  discussion,  for  the  superlative  degree;  and 
his  kindness,  in  the  oddest  way,  seemed  to  have  no 
thing  to  do  with  his  experience.  He  could  deal  with 
things  perfectly,  for  all  his  needs,  without  getting  near 
them. 

This  was  the  way  he  dealt  with  his  wife,  a  large 
proportion  of  whose  meanings  he  knew  he  could  neg 
lect.  He  edited  for  their  general  economy  the  play 
of  her  mind,  just  as  he  edited,  savingly,  with  the  stump 
of  a  pencil,  her  redundant  telegrams.  The  thing  in 
the  world  that  was  least  of  a  mystery  to  him  was  his 
Club,  which  he  was  accepted  as  perhaps  too  com 
pletely  managing,  and  which  he  managed  on  lines  of 
perfect  penetration.  His  connexion  with  it  was  really 

6? 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

a  masterpiece  of  editing.  This  was  in  fact,  to  come 
back,  very  much  the  process  he  might  have  been  pro 
posing  to  apply  to  Mrs.  Assingham's  view  of  what 
was  now  before  them;  that  is  to  their  connexion  with 
Charlotte  Stant's  possibilities.  They  would  n't  lavish 
on  them  all  their  little  fortune  of  curiosity  and  alarm ; 
certainly  they  would  n't  spend  their  cherished  savings 
so  early  in  the  day.  He  liked  Charlotte,  moreover, 
who  was  a  smooth  and  compact  inmate  and  whom  he 
felt  as,  with  her  instincts  that  made  against  waste, 
much  more  of  his  own  sort  than  his  wife.  He  could 
talk  with  her  about  Fanny  almost  better  than  he  could 
talk  with  Fanny  about  Charlotte.  However,  he  made 
at  present  the  best  of  the  latter  necessity,  even  to  the 
pressing  of  the  question  he  has  been  noted  as  having 
last  uttered.  "  If  you  can't  think  what  to  be  afraid  of, 
wait  till  you  can  think.  Then  you  '11  do  it  much  better. 
Or  otherwise,  if  that's  waiting  too  long,  find  out  from 
her.  Don't  try  to  find  out  from  me.  Ask  her  herself." 
Mrs.  Assingham  denied,  as  we  know,  that  her  hus 
band  had  a  play  of  mind;  so  that  she  could,  on  her 
side,  treat  these  remarks  only  as  if  they  had  been 
senseless  physical  gestures  or  nervous  facial  move 
ments.  She  overlooked  them  as  from  habit  and  kind 
ness;  yet  there  was  no  one  to  whom  she  talked  so  per 
sistently  of  such  intimate  things.  "  It 's  her  friendship 
with  Maggie  that's  the  immense  complication.  Be 
cause  that"  she  audibly  mused,  "is  so  natural." 
"Then  why  can't  she  have  come  out  for  it?" 
"She  came  out,"  Mrs.  Assingham  continued  to 
meditate,  "because  she  hates  America.  There  was  no 
place  for  her  there  —  she  did  n't  fit  in.  She  was  n't 

68 


THE   PRINCE 

in  sympathy — no  more  were  the  people  she  saw. 
Then  it's  hideously  dear;  she  can't,  on  her  means,  be 
gin  to  live  there.  Not  at  all  as  she  can,  in  a  way,  here." 

"In  the  way,  you  mean,  of  living  with  us?" 

"Of  living  with  any  one.  She  can't  live  by  visits 
alone  —  and  she  does  n't  want  to.  She 's  too  good  for 
it  even  if  she  could.  But  she  will  —  she  must,  sooner 
or  later — stay  with  them.  Maggie  will  want  her — 
Maggie  will  make  her.  Besides,  she  '11  want  to  herself." 

"Then  why  won't  that  do,"  the  Colonel  asked,  "for 
you  to  think  it's  what  she  has  come  for?" 

"  How  will  it  do,  how  ?  "  — she  went  on  as  without 
hearing  him.  "That's  what  one  keeps  feeling." 

"  Why  should  n't  it  do  beautifully  ? " 

"That  anything  of  the  past,"  she  brooded,  "should 
come  back  now  ?  How  will  it  do,  how  will  it  do  ? " 

"  It  will  do,  I  dare  say,  without  your  wringing  your 
hands  over  it.  When,  my  dear,"  the  Colonel  pursued 
as  he  smoked,  "have  you  ever  seen  anything  of  yours 
—  anything  that  you've  done — not  do  ?" 

"Ah  I  didn't  do  this!"  It  brought  her  answer 
straight.  "I  did  n't  bring  her  back." 

"  Did  you  expect  her  to  stay  over  there  all  her  days 
to  oblige  you  ? " 

"Not  a  bit — for  I  should  n't  have  minded  her 
coming  after  their  marriage.  It 's  her  coming  this  way 
before."  To  which  she  added  with  inconsequence: 
"  I  'm  too  sorry  for  her — of  course  she  can't  enjoy  it. 
But  I  don't  see  what  perversity  rides  her.  She  need  n't 
have  looked  it  all  so  in  the  face  —  as  she  does  n't  do  it, 
I  suppose,  simply  for  discipline.  It's  almost — that's 
the  bore  of  it  —  discipline  to  me." 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"  Perhaps  then,"  said  Bob  Assingham,  "  that 's  what 
has  been  her  idea.  Take  it,  for  God's  sake,  as  dis 
cipline  to  you  and  have  done  with  it.  It  will  do,"  he 
added,  "for  discipline  to  me  as  well." 

She  was  far,  however,  from  having  done  with  it; 
it  was  a  situation  with  such  different  sides,  as  she 
said,  and  to  none  of  which  one  could,  in  justice,  be 
blind.  "  It  is  n't  in  the  least,  you  know,  for  instance, 
that  I  believe  she 's  bad.  Never,  never,"  Mrs.  Assing 
ham  declared.  "  I  don't  think  that  of  her." 

"Then  why  is  n't  that  enough  ?" 

Nothing  was  enough,  Mrs.  Assingham  signified,  but 
that  she  should  develop  her  thought.  "She  doesn't 
deliberately  intend,  she  does  n't  consciously  wish,  the 
least  complication.  It's  perfectly  true  that  she  thinks 
Maggie  a  dear — as  who  does  n't  ?  She 's  incapable  of 
any  plan  to  hurt  a  hair  of  her  head.  Yet  here  she  is  — • 
and  there  they  are,"  she  wound  up. 

Her  husband  again  for  a  little  smoked  in  silence. 
"What  in  the  world,  between  them,  ever  took  place  ? " 

"  Between  Charlotte  and  the  Prince  ?  Why  no 
thing — except  their  having  to  recognise  that  nothing 
could.  That  was  their  little  romance  — it  was  even 
their  little  tragedy." 

"But  what  the  deuce  did  they  do  ?" 

"Do  ?  They  fell  in  love  with  each  other — but,  see 
ing  it  was  n't  possible,  gave  each  other  up." 

"Then  where  was  the  romance?" 

"Why  in  their  frustration,  in  their  having  the  cour 
age  to  look  the  facts  in  the  face." 

"What  facts?"  the  Colonel  went  on. 

"Well,  to  begin  with,  that  of  their  neither  of  them 

7° 


THE  PRINCE 

having  the  means  to  marry.  If  she  had  had  even  a 
little  —  a  little,  I  mean,  for  two — I  believe  he  would 
bravely  have  done  it."  After  which,  as  her  husband 
but  emitted  an  odd  vague  sound,  she  corrected  herself. 
*'  I  mean  if  he  himself  had  had  only  a  little — or  a  little 
more  than  a  little,  a  little  for  a  prince.  They  would 
have  done  what  they  could"  —  she  did  them  justice 
—  "if  there  had  been  a  way.  But  there  was  n't  a  way, 
and  Charlotte,  quite  to  her  honour,  I  consider,  under 
stood  it.  He  had  to  have  money — it  was  a  question 
of  life  and  death.  It  would  n't  have  been  a  bit  amus 
ing,  either,  to  marry  him  as  a  pauper — I  mean  leav 
ing  him  one.  That  was  what  she  had  —  as  he  had  — 
the  reason  to  see." 

"And  their  reason  is  what  you  call  their  romance  ? " 

She  looked  at  him  a  moment.  "What  do  you  want 
more  ? " 

"Didn't  he,"  the  Colonel  enquired,  "want  any 
thing  more  ?  Or  did  n't,  for  that  matter,  poor  Char 
lotte  herself?" 

She  kept  her  eyes  on  him ;  there  was  a  manner  in  it 
that  half  answered.  "They  were  thoroughly  in  love. 
She  might  have  been  his — "  She  checked  herself; 
she  even  for  a  minute  lost  herself.  "She  might  have 
been  anything  she  liked — except  his  wife." 

"  But  she  was  n't,"  said  the  Colonel  very  smokingly. 

"She  was  n't,"  Mrs.  Assingham  echoed. 

The  echo,  not  loud  but  deep,  filled  for  a  little  the 
room.  He  seemed  to  listen  to  it  die  away;  then  he 
began  again.  "  How  are  you  sure  ? " 

She  waited  before  saying,  but  when  she  spoke  it  was 
definite.  "There  was  n't  time." 

71 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

He  had  a  small  laugh  for  her  reason;  he  might  have 
expected  some  other.  "  Does  it  take  so  much  time  ? " 

She  herself,  however,  remained  serious.  "It  takes 
more  than  they  had." 

He  was  detached,  but  he  wondered.  "What  was  the 
matter  with  their  time  ? "  After  which,  as,  remember 
ing  it  all,  living  it  over  and  piecing  it  together,  she 
only  considered,  "You  mean  that  you  came  in  with 
your  idea?"  he  demanded. 

It  brought  her  quickly  to  the  point,  and  as  if  also 
in  a  measure  to  answer  herself.  "  Not  a  bit  of  it  — 
then.  But  you  surely  recall,"  she  went  on,  "the  way, 
a  year  ago,  everything  took  place.  They  had  parted 
before  he  had  ever  heard  of  Maggie." 

"Why  had  n't  he  heard  of  her  from  Charlotte  her 
self?" 

"  Because  she  had  never  spoken  of  her." 

" Is  that  also,"  the  Colonel  enquired,  "what  she  has 
told  you  ? " 

"I'm  not  speaking,"  his  wife  returned,  "of  what 
she  has  told  me.  That's  one  thing.  I  'm  speaking  of 
what  I  know  by  myself.  That's  another." 

"You  feel  in  other  words  that  she  lies  to  you  ? "  Bob 
Assingham  more  sociably  asked. 

She  neglected  the  question,  treating  it  as  gross. 
"She  never  so  much,  at  the  time,  as  named  Maggie." 

It  was  so  positive  that  it  appeared  to  strike  him. 
"It's  he  then  who  has  told  you?" 

She  after  a  moment  admitted  it.   "It's  he." 

"And  he  does  n't  lie?" 

"No — to  do  him  justice.  I  believe  he  absolutely 
does  n't.  If  I  had  n't  believed  it,"  Mrs.  Assingham 

72 


THE   PRINCE 

declared  for  her  general  justification,  "I'd  have  had 
nothing  to  do  with  him — that  is  in  this  connexion. 
He's  a  gentleman  —  I  mean  all  as  much  of  one  as  he 
ought  to  be.  And  he  had  nothing  to  gain.  That  helps," 
she  added,  "even  a  gentleman.  It  was  I  who  named 
Maggie  to  him  —  a  year  from  last  May.  He  had 
never  heard  of  her  before." 

"Then  it's  grave,"  said  the  Colonel. 

She  briefly  weighed  it.  "Do  you  mean  grave  for 
me?" 

"Oh  that  everything's  grave  for  'you'  is  what  we 
take  for  granted  and  are  fundamentally  talking  about. 
It's  grave  —  it  was  —  for  Charlotte.  And  it's  grave 
for  Maggie.  That  is  it  w as — when  he  did  see  her.  Or 
when  she  did  see  him." 

"You  don't  torment  me  as  much  as  you  would  like," 
she  presently  went  on,  "because  you  think  of  nothing 
that  I  have  n't  a  thousand  times  thought  of,  and  be 
cause  I  think  of  everything  that  you  never  will.  It 
would  all,"  she  recognised,  "have  been  grave  if  it 
had  n't  all  been  right.  You  can't  make  out,"  she  con 
tended,  "that  we  got  to  Rome  before  the  end  of 
February." 

He  more  than  agreed.  "There 's  nothing  in  life,  my 
dear,  that  I  can  make  out." 

Well,  there  was  apparently  nothing  in  life  that  she 
at  real  need  could  n't.  "Charlotte,  who  had  been 
there  that  year  from  early,  early  in  November,  left 
suddenly,  you  '11  quite  remember,  about  the  tenth  of 
April.  She  was  to  have  stayed  on  —  she  was  to  have 
stayed,  naturally,  more  or  less,  for  us ;  and  she  was  to 
have  stayed  all  the  more  that  the  Ververs,  due  all  win- 

73 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

ter,  but  delayed,  week  after  week,  in  Paris,  were  at 
last  really  coming.  They  were  coming  — that  is  Mag 
gie  was  —  largely  to  see  her,  and  above  all  to  be  with 
her  there.  It  was  all  altered  —  by  Charlotte's  going  to 
Florence.  She  went  from  one  day  to  the  other — you 
forget  everything.  She  gave  her  reasons,  but  I  thought 
it  odd  at  the  time;  I  had  a  sense  that  something  must 
have  happened.  The  difficulty  was  that  though  I 
knew  a  little  I  did  n't  know  enough.  I  did  n't  know 
her  relation  with  him  had  been,  as  you  say,  a  'near* 
thing  — that  is  I  did  n't  know  how  near.  The  poor 
girl's  departure  was  a  flight  —  she  went  to  save 
herself." 

He  had  listened  more  than  he  showed  —  as  came 
out  in  his  tone.  "To  save  herself?" 

"Well,  also  really  I  think  to  save  him  too.  I  saw 
it  afterwards  —  I  see  it  all  now.  He'd  have  been 
sorry — he  did  n't  want  to  hurt  her." 

"Oh  I  dare  say,"  the  Colonel  laughed.  "They 
generally  don't!" 

"At  all  events,"  his  wife  pursued,  "she  escaped  — 
they  both  did;  for  they  had  had  simply  to  face  it. 
Their  marriage  could  n't  be,  and,  if  that  was  so,  the 
sooner  they  put  the  Apennines  between  them  the  bet 
ter.  It  had  taken  them,  it's  true,  some  time  to  feel 
this  and  to  find  it  out.  They  had  met  constantly,  and 
not  always  publicly,  all  that  winter;  they  had  met 
more  than  was  known — though  it  was  a  good  deal 
known.  More,  certainly,"  she  said,  "than  I  then 
imagined — though  I  don't  know  what  difference  it 
would  after  all  have  made  with  me.  I  liked  him,  I 
thought  him  charming,  from  the  first  of  our  knowing 

74 


THE  PRINCE 

him;  and  now,  after  more  than  a  year,  he  has  done 
nothing  to  spoil  it.  And  there  are  things  he  might 
have  done — things  that  many  men  easily  would. 
Therefore  I  believe  in  him,  and  I  was  right,  at  first,  in 
knowing  I  was  going  to.  So  I  haven't"  —  and  she 
stated  it  as  she  might  have  quoted  from  a  slate,  after 
adding  up  the  items,  the  sum  of  a  column  of  figures  — 
"  so  I  have  n't,  I  say  to  myself,  been  a  fool." 

"  Well,  are  you  trying  to  make  out  that  I  Ve  said 
you  have  ?  All  their  case  wants,  at  any  rate,"  Bob 
Assingham  declared,  "is  that  you  should  leave  it  well 
alone.  It's  theirs  now;  they've  bought  it,  over  the 
counter,  and  paid  for  it.  It  has  ceased  to  be  yours." 

"Of  which  case,"  she  asked,  "are  you  speaking?" 

He  smoked  a  minute:  then  with  a  groan:  "Lord, 
are  there  so  many  ? " 

"There's  Maggie's  and  the  Prince's,  and  there's 
the  Prince's  and  Charlotte's." 

"Oh  yes;  and  then,"  the  Colonel  scoffed,  "there's 
Charlotte's  and  the  Prince's." 

"There's  Maggie's  and  Charlotte's,"  she  went  on 

—  "and  there's  also  Maggie's  and  mine.   I  think  too 
that  there 's  Charlotte's  and  mine.   Yes,"  she  mused, 
"Charlotte's  and  mine  is  certainly  a  case.    In  short, 
you  see,  there  are  plenty.   But  I  mean,"  she  said,  "to 
keep  my  head." 

"  Are  we  to  settle  them  all,"  he  enquired, "  to-night  ? " 
"  I  should  lose  it  if  things  had  happened  otherwise 

—  if  I  had  acted  with  any  folly."    She  had  gone  on 
in  her  earnestness,  unheeding  of   his  question.    "I 
should  n't  be  able  to  bear  that  now.    But  my  good 
conscience  is  my  strength ;  no  one  can  accuse  me.  The 

75 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

Ververs  came  on  to  Rome  alone  —  Charlotte,  after 
their  days  with  her  in  Florence,  had  decided  about 
America.  Maggie,  I  dare  say,  had  helped  her;  she 
must  have  made  her  a  present,  and  a  handsome  one, 
so  that  many  things  were  easy.  Charlotte  left  them, 
came  to  England,  'joined'  somebody  or  other,  sailed 
for  New  York.  I  have  still  her  letter  from  Milan, 
telling  me;  I  did  n't  know  at  the  moment  all  that  was 
behind  it,  but  I  felt  in  it  nevertheless  the  undertaking 
of  a  new  life.  Certainly,  in  any  case,  it  cleared  that 
air — I  mean  the  dear  old  Roman,  in  which  we  were 
steeped.  It  left  the  field  free  —  it  gave  me  a  free  hand. 
There  was  no  question  for  me  of  anybody  else  when 
I  brought  the  two  others  together.  More  than  that, 
there  was  no  question  for  them.  So  you  see,"  she 
concluded,  "where  that  puts  me." 

She  got  up,  on  the  words,  very  much  as  if  they  were 
the  blue  daylight  towards  which,  through  a  darksome 
tunnel,  she  had  been  pushing  her  way,  and  the  elation 
in  her  voice,  combined  with  her  recovered  alertness, 
might  have  signified  the  sharp  whistle  of  the  train  that 
shoots  at  last  into  the  open.  She  turned  about  the 
room;  she  looked  out  a  moment  into  the  August  night; 
she  stopped  here  and  there  before  the  flowers  in  bowls 
and  vases.  Yes,  it  was  distinctly  as  if  she  had  proved 
what  was  needing  proof,  as  if  the  issue  of  her  operation 
had  been  almost  unexpectedly  a  success.  Old  arith 
metic  had  perhaps  been  fallacious,  but  the  new  set 
tled  the  question.  Her  husband  oddly,  however,  kept 
his  place  without  apparently  measuring  these  results. 
As  he  had  been  amused  at  her  intensity,  so  he  was  n't 
uplifted  by  her  relief;  his  interest  might  in  fact  have 

76 


THE  PRINCE 

been  more  enlisted  than  he  allowed.  "  Do  you  mean," 
he  presently  asked,  "that  he  had  already  forgot  about 
Charlotte?" 

She  faced  round  as  if  he  had  touched  a  spring.  "  He 
wanted  to,  naturally — and  it  was  much  the  best  thing 
he  could  do."  She  was  in  possession  of  the  main  case, 
as  it  truly  seemed ;  she  had  it  all  now.  "  He  was  cap 
able  of  the  effort,  and  he  took  the  best  way.  Remem 
ber  too  what  Maggie  then  seemed  to  us." 

"  She 's  very  nice,  but  she  always  seems  to  me  more 
than  anything  else  the  young  woman  who  has  a  million 
a  year.  If  you  mean  that  that 's  what  she  especially 
seemed  to  him  you  of  course  place  the  thing  in  your 
light.  The  effort  to  forget  Charlotte  could  n't,  I  grant 
you,  have  been  so  difficult." 

This  pulled  her  up  but  for  an  instant.  "  I  never  said 
he  did  n't  from  the  first  —  I  never  said  that  he  does  n't 
more  and  more — like  Maggie's  money." 

"I  never  said  I  should  n't  have  liked  it  myself," 
Bob  Assingham  returned.  He  made  no  movement;  he 
smoked  another  minute.  "How  much  did  Maggie 
know?" 

"How  much  ?"  She  seemed  to  consider  —  as  if  it 
were  between  quarts  and  gallons  —  how  best  to  ex 
press  the  quantity.  "She  knew  what  Charlotte,  if 
Florence,  had  told  her." 

"And  what  had  Charlotte  told  her?" 

"Very  little." 

"What  makes  you  so  sure  ?" 

"Why  this — that  she  could  n't  tell  her."  And  she 
explained  a  little  what  she  meant.  "There  are  things, 
my  dear — have  n't  you  felt  it  yourself,  coarse  as  you 

77 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

are? — that  no  one  could  tell  Maggie.  There  are 
things  that,  upon  my  word,  I  should  n't  care  to  at 
tempt  to  tell  her  now." 

The  Colonel  smoked  on  it.  "  She  'd  be  so  scandal 
ised?" 

"She'd  be  so  frightened.  She'd  be,  in  her  strange 
little  way,  so  hurt.  She  was  n't  born  to  know  evil. 
She  must  never  know  it." 

Bob  Assingham  had  a  queer  grim  laugh;  the  sound 
of  which  in  fact  fixed  his  wife  before  him.  "  We  're 
taking  grand  ways  to  prevent  it." 

But  she  stood  there  to  protest.  "  We  're  not  taking 
any  ways.  The  ways  are  all  taken ;  they  were  taken 
from  the  moment  he  came  up  to  our  carriage  that  day 
in  Villa  Borghese — the  second  or  third  of  her  days 
in  Rome,  when,  as  you  remember,  you  went  off  some 
where  with  Mr.  Verver,  and  the  Prince,  who  had  got 
into  the  carriage  with  us,  came  home  with  us  to  tea. 
They  had  met;  they  had  seen  each  other  well;  they 
were  in  relation :  the  rest  was  to  come  of  itself  and  as 
it  could.  It  began,  practically,  I  recollect,  in  our  drive. 
Maggie  happened  to  learn,  by  some  other  man's  greet 
ing  of  him,  in  the  bright  Roman  way,  from  a  street- 
corner  as  we  passed,  that  one  of  the  Prince's  baptismal 
names,  the  one  always  used  for  him  among  his  rela 
tions,  was  Amerigo:  which — as  you  probably  don't 
know,  however,  even  after  a  lifetime  of  me — was  the 
name,  four  hundred  years  ago,  or  whenever,  of  the 
pushing  man  who  followed,  across  the  sea,  in  the 
wake  of  Columbus  and  succeeded,  where  Columbus 
had  failed,  in  becoming  godfather,  or  name-father, 
to  the  new  Continent;  so  that  the  thought  of  any 

78 


THE   PRINCE 

connexion  with  him  can  even  now  thrill  our  artless 
breasts." 

The  Colonel's  grim  placidity  could  always  quite 
adequately  meet  his  wife's  not  infrequent  imputation 
of  ignorances,  on  the  score  of  the  land  of  her  birth, 
unperturbed  and  unashamed;  and  these  dark  depths 
were  even  at  the  present  moment  not  directly  lighted 
by  an  enquiry  that  managed  to  be  curious  without 
being  apologetic.  "But  where  does  the  connexion 
come  in  ? " 

She  had  it  ready.  "By  the  women — that  is  by 
some  obliging  woman,  of  old,  who  was  a  descendant 
of  the  pushing  man,  the  make-believe  discoverer,  and 
whom  the  Prince  is  therefore  luckily  able  to  refer  to 
as  an  ancestress.  A  branch  of  the  other  family  had 
become  great — great  enough,  at  least,  to  marry  into 
his;  and  the  name  of  the  navigator,  crowned  with 
glory,  was,  very  naturally,  to  become  so  the  fashion 
among  them  that  some  son,  of  every  generation,  was 
appointed  to  wear  it.  My  point  is  at  any  rate  that  I 
recall  noticing  at  the  time  how  the  Prince  was  from 
the  start  helped  with  the  dear  Ververs  by  his  wearing 
it.  The  connexion  became  romantic  for  Maggie  the 
moment  she  took  it  in;  she  filled  out,  in  a  flash,  every 
link  that  might  be  vague.  '  By  that  sign,'  I  quite  said 
to  myself,  'he '11  conquer'  — with  his  good  fortune,  of 
course,  of  having  the  other  necessary  signs  too.  It 
really,"  said  Mrs.  Assingham,  "was,  practically,  the 
fine  side  of  the  wedge.  Which  struck  me  as  also,"  she 
wound  up,  "a  lovely  note  for  the  candour  of  the 
Ververs." 

The  Colonel  had  followed,  but  his  comment  was 

79 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

prosaic.    "He  knew,  Amerigo,  what  he  was  about. 
And  I  don't  mean  the  old  one." 

"  I  know  what  you  mean ! "  his  wife  bravely  threw 
off. 

"The  old  one'* — he  pointed  his  effect — "isn't 
the  only  discoverer  in  the  family." 

"Oh  as  much  as  you  like!  If  he  discovered  Amer 
ica  — or  got  himself  honoured  as  if  he  had  — his  suc 
cessors  were  in  due  time  to  discover  the  Americans. 
And  it  was  one  of  them  in  particular,  doubtless, 
who  was  to  discover  how  patriotic  we  are." 

"Would  n't  this  be  the  same  one,"  the  Colonel 
asked,  "who  really  discovered  what  you  call  the 
connexion  ? " 

She  gave  him  a  look.  "The  connexion's  a  true 
thing — the  connexion's  perfectly  historic.  Your  in 
sinuations  recoil  upon  your  cynical  mind.  Don't  you 
understand,"  she  asked,  "that  the  history  of  such 
people  is  known,  root  and  branch,  at  every  moment 
of  its  course  ? " 

"Oh  it's  all  right,"  said  Bob  Assingham. 

"  Go  to  the  British  Museum,"  his  companion  con 
tinued  with  spirit. 

"And  what  am  I  to  do  there  ?" 

"  There 's  a  whole  immense  room,  or  recess,  or  de 
partment,  or  whatever,  filled  with  books  written  about 
his  family  alone.  You  can  see  for  yourself  ? " 

"Have  you  seen  for  your  self?" 

She  faltered  but  an  instant.  "Certainly  —  I  went 
one  day  with  Maggie.  We  looked  him  up,  so  to  say. 
They  were  most  civil."  And  she  fell  again  into  the 
current  her  husband  had  slightly  ruffled.  "The  effect 

80 


THE   PRINCE 

was  produced,  the  charm  began  to  work  at  all  events, 
in  Rome,  from  that  hour  of  the  Prince's  drive  with  us. 
My  only  course  afterwards  had  to  be  to  make  the  best 
of  it.  It  was  certainly  good  enough  for  that,"  Mrs. 
Assingham  hastened  to  add,  "and  I  did  n't  in  the  least 
see  my  duty  in  making  the  worst.  In  the  same  situa 
tion  to-day  I  would  n't  act  differently.  I  entered  into 
the  case  as  it  then  appeared  to  me  — and  as  for  the 
matter  of  that  it  still  does.  I  liked  it,  I  thought  all 
sorts  of  good  of  it,  and  nothing  can  even  now,"  she 
said  with  some  intensity,  "make  me  think  anything 
else." 

"Nothing  can  ever  make  you  think  anything  you 
don't  want  to,"  the  Colonel,  still  in  his  chair,  remarked 
over  his  pipe.  "  You  've  got  a  precious  power  of  think 
ing  whatever  you  do  want.  You  want  also,  from  mo 
ment  to  moment,  to  think  such  desperately  different 
things.  What  happened,"  he  went  on,  "was  that  you 
fell  violently  in  love  with  the  Prince  yourself,  and  that 
as  you  could  n't  get  me  out  of  the  way  you  had  to  take 
some  roundabout  course.  You  could  n't  marry  him, 
any  more  than  Charlotte  could  — that  is  not  to  your 
self.  But  you  could  to  somebody  else  — it  was  always 
the  Prince,  it  was  always  marriage.  You  could  to 
your  little  friend,  to  whom  there  were  no  objections." 

"Not  only  there  were  no  objections,  but  there  were 
reasons,  positive  ones — and  all  excellent,  all  charm 
ing."  She  spoke  with  an  absence  of  all  repudiation 
of  his  exposure  of  the  spring  of  her  conduct;  and  this 
abstention,  clearly  and  effectively  conscious,  evidently 
cost  her  nothing.  "  It  is  always  the  Prince,  and  it  is 
always,  thank  heaven,  marriage.  And  these  are  the 

81 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

things,  God  grant,  that  it  will  always  be.  That  I  could 
help,  a  year  ago,  most  assuredly  made  me  happy,  and 
it  continues  to  make  me  happy/' 

"Then  why  are  n't  you  quiet?" 

"I  am  quiet,"  said  Fanny  Assingham. 

He  looked  at  her,  with  his  colourless  candour,  still 
in  his  place;  she  moved  about  again  a  little,  empha 
sising  by  her  unrest  her  declaration  of  her  tranquillity. 
He  was  as  silent  at  first  as  if  he  had  taken  her  answer, 
but  he  was  n't  to  keep  it  long.  "What  do  you  make 
of  it  that,  by  your  own  show,  Charlotte  could  n't  tell 
her  all  ?  What  do  you  make  of  it  that  the  Prince 
did  n't  tell  her  anything  ?  Say  one  understands  that 
there  are  things  she  can't  be  told  —  since,  as  you  put 
it,  she  is  so  easily  scared  and  shocked."  He  produced 
these  objections  slowly,  giving  her  time,  by  his  pauses, 
to  stop  roaming  and  come  back  to  him.  But  she  was 
roaming  still  when  he  concluded  his  enquiry.  "If 
there  had  n't  been  anything  there  should  n't  have  been 
between  the  pair  before  Charlotte  bolted  —  in  order, 
precisely,  as  you  say,  that  there  should  n't  be :  why  in 
the  world  was  what  there  had  been  too  bad  to  be 
spoken  of?" 

Mrs.  Assingham,  after  this  question,  continued  still 
to  circulate  —  not  directly  meeting  it  even  when  at 
last  she  stopped.  "I  thought  you  wanted  me  to  be 
quiet." 

"So  I  do  —  and  I  'm  trying  to  make  you  so  much  so 
that  you  won't  worry  more.  Can't  you  be  quiet  on 
that?" 

She  thought  a  moment — then  seemed  to  try.  "To 
relate  that  she  had  to  'bolt'  for  the  reasons  we  speak 

82 


THE  PRINCE 

of,  even  though  the  bolting  had  done  for  her  what  she 
wished — that  I  can  perfectly  feel  Charlotte's  not 
wanting  to  do." 

"Ah  then  if  it  has  done  for  her  what  she  wished —  ! " 
But  the  Colonel's  conclusion  hung  by  the  "if"  which 
his  wife  did  n't  take  up.  So  it  hung  but  the  longer 
when  he  presently  spoke  again.  "All  one  wonders,  in 
that  case,  is  why  then  she  has  come  back  to  him." 

"Say  she  has  n't  come  back  to  him.  Not  really  to 
him." 

"  I  '11  say  anything  you  like.  But  that  won't  do  me 
the  same  good  as  your  saying  it." 

"  Nothing,  my  dear,  will  do  you  good,"  Mrs.  Assing- 
ham  returned.  "You  don't  care  for  anything  in  itself; 
you  care  for  nothing  but  to  be  grossly  amused  because 
I  don't  keep  washing  my  hands  — !" 

"I  thought  your  whole  argument  was  that  every 
thing  is  so  right  that  this  is  precisely  what  you  do." 

But  his  wife,  as  it  was  a  point  she  had  often  made, 
could  go  on  as  she  had  gone  on  before.  "You 're  per 
fectly  indifferent,  really;  you're  perfectly  immoral. 
You  've  taken  part  in  the  sack  of  cities,  and  I  'm  sure 
you  've  done  dreadful  things  yourself.  But  I  dont 
trouble  my  head,  if  you  like.  *  So  now  there ! ' "  she 
laughed. 

He  accepted  her  laugh,  but  he  kept  his  way.  "Well, 
I  back  poor  Charlotte." 

"'Back'  her?" 

"To  know  what  she  wants." 

"Ah  then,  so  do  I.  She  does  know  what  she  wants." 
And  Mrs.  Assingham  produced  this  quantity,  at  last, 
on  the  girl's  behalf,  as  the  ripe  result  of  her  late  wan- 

83 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

derings  and  musings.  She  had  groped  through  their 
talk  for  the  thread  and  now  had  got  it.  "She  wants 
to  be  magnificent." 

"She  is,"  said  the  Colonel  almost  cynically. 

"She  wants" — his  wife  now  had  it  fast — "to  be 
thoroughly  superior,  and  she 's  capable  of  that." 

"Of  wanting  to  ?" 

"Of  carrying  out  her  idea." 

"And  what  is  her  idea?" 

"To  see  Maggie  through." 

Bob  Assingham  wondered.    "Through  what?" 

"Through  everything.  She  knows  the  Prince.  And 
Maggie  doesn't.  No,  dear  thing"  —  Mrs.  Assing 
ham  had  to  recognise  it  —  "she  does  n't." 

"So  that  Charlotte  has  come  out  to  give  her  les 
sons  ? " 

She  continued,  Fanny  Assingham,  to  work  out  her 
thought.  "She  has  done  this  great  thing  for  him. 
That  is  a  year  ago  she  practically  did  it.  She  prac 
tically,  at  any  rate,  helped  him  to  do  it  himself — and 
helped  me  to  help  him.  She  kept  off,  she  stayed  away, 
she  left  him  free;  and  what,  moreover,  were  her 
silences  to  Maggie  but  a  direct  aid  to  him  ?  If  she  had 
spoken  in  Florence;  if  she  had  told  her  own  poor  story; 
if  she  had  come  back  at  any  time — till  within  a  few 
weeks  ago;  if  she  had  n't  gone  to  New  York  and 
had  n't  held  out  there :  if  she  had  n't  done  these  things 
all  that  has  happened  since  would  certainly  have  been 
different.  Therefore  she 's  in  a  position  to  be  consist 
ent  now.  She  knows  the  Prince,"  Mrs.  Assingham  re 
peated.  It  involved  even  again  her  former  recognition. 
"And  Maggie,  dear  thing,  does  n't." 


THE   PRINCE 

She  was  high,  she  was  lucid,  she  was  almost  in 
spired  ;  and  it  was  but  the  deeper  drop  therefore  to  her 
husband's  flat  common  sense.  "  In  other  words  Mag 
gie  is,  by  her  ignorance,  in  danger  ?  Then  if  she 's  in 
danger,  there  is  danger." 

"There  won't  be — with  Charlotte's  understanding 
of  it.  That's  where  she  has  had  her  conception  of 
being  able  to  be  heroic,  of  being  able  in  fact  to  be 
sublime.  She  /V,  she  will  be" — the  good  lady  by 
this  time  glowed.  "So  she  sees  it — to  become,  for 
her  best  friend,  an  element  of  positive  safety." 

Bob  Assingham  looked  at  it  hard.  "Which  of  them 
do  you  call  her  best  friend  ? " 

She  gave  a  toss  of  impatience.  "  I  '11  leave  you  to 
discover!"  But  the  grand  truth  thus  made  out  she 
had  now  completely  adopted.  "It's  for  us  therefore 
to  be  hers." 

"'Hers'?" 

"You  and  I.  It 's  for  us  to  be  Charlotte's.  It's  for 
us  on  our  side  to  see  her  through." 

"Through  her  sublimity?" 

"Through  her  noble  lonely  life.  Only — that's  es 
sential — it  must  n't  be  lonely.  It  will  be  all  right  if 
she  marries." 

"So  we're  to  marry  her?" 

"We  're  to  marry  her.  It  will  be,"  Mrs.  Assingham 
continued,  "the  great  thing  I  can  do."  She  made  it 
out  more  and  more.  "It  will  make  up." 

"  Make  up  for  what  ? "  As  she  said  nothing, 
however,  his  desire  for  lucidity  renewed  itself.  "If 
everything 's  so  all  right  what  is  there  to  make  up 
for?" 

85 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"Why  if  I  did  do  either  of  them  by  any  chance  a 
wrong.  If  I  made  a  mistake/' 

"  You  '11  make  up  for  it  by  making  another  ? "  And 
then  as  she  again  took  her  time:  "I  thought  your 
whole  point  is  just  that  you  're  sure." 

"  One  can  never  be  ideally  sure  of  anything.  There 
are  always  possibilities." 

"Then  if  we  can  but  strike  so  wild  why  keep  med 
dling?" 

It  made  her  again  look  at  him.  "Where  would  you 
have  been,  my  dear,  if  I  had  n't  meddled  with  jyowr"' 

"Ah  that  was  n't  meddling — I  was  your  own.  I 
was  your  own,"  said  the  Colonel,  "  from  the  moment 
I  did  n't  object." 

"Well,  these  people  won't  object.  They  are  my 
own  too — in  the  sense  that  I  'm  awfully  fond  of  them. 
Also  in  the  sense,"  she  continued,  "that  I  think 
they  're  not  so  very  much  less  fond  of  me.  Our  rela 
tion,  all  round,  exists — it's  a  reality,  and  a  very  good 
one;  we're  mixed  up,  so  to  speak,  and  it's  too  late  to 
change  it.  We  must  live  in  it  and  with  it.  Therefore 
to  see  that  Charlotte  gets  a  good  husband  as  soon  as 
possible — that,  as  I  say,  will  be  one  of  my  ways  of 
living.  It  will  cover,"  she  said  with  conviction,  "all 
the  ground."  And  then  as  his  own  conviction  ap 
peared  to  continue  as  little  to  match :  "The  ground,  I 
mean,  of  any  nervousness  I  may  ever  feel.  It  will  be  in 
fact  my  duty  —  and  I  shan't  rest  till  my  duty's  per 
formed."  She  had  arrived  by  this  time  at  something 
like  exaltation.  "  I  shall  give,  for  the  next  year  or  two 
if  necessary,  my  life  to  it.  I  shall  have  done  in  that 
case  what  I  can." 

86 


THE  PRINCE 

He  took  it  at  last  as  it  came.  "  You  hold  there 's  no 
limit  to  what  you  'can'?" 

"  I  don't  say  there 's  no  limit,  or  anything  of  the 
sort.  I  say  there  are  good  chances — enough  of  them 
for  hope.  Why  should  n't  there  be  when  a  girl  is  after 
all  what  she  is  ? " 

"By  after  'all'  you  mean  after  she's  in  love  with 
somebody  else  ? " 

The  Colonel  put  his  question  with  a  quietude 
doubtless  designed  to  be  fatal;  but  it  scarcely  pulled 
her  up.  "  She 's  not  too  much  in  love  not  herself  to 
want  to  marry.  She  would  now  particularly  like  to." 

"  Has  she  told  you  so  ? " 

"Not  yet.  It's  too  soon.  But  she  will.  Meanwhile 
however  I  don't  require  the  information.  Her  marry 
ing  will  prove  the  truth." 

"And  what  truth?" 

"The  truth  of  everything  I  say." 

"  Prove  it  to  whom  ? " 

"Well,  to  myself,  to  begin  with.  That  will  be 
enough  for  me — to  work  for  her.  What  it  will 
prove,"  Mrs.  Assingham  presently  went  on,  "will  be 
that  she's  cured.  That  she  accepts  the  situation." 

He  paid  this  the  tribute  of  a  long  pull  at  his  pipe. 
"The  situation  of  doing  the  one  thing  she  can  that 
will  really  seem  to  cover  her  tracks  ? " 

His  wife  looked  at  him,  the  good  dry  man,  as  if  now 
at  last  he  was  merely  vulgar.  "The  one  thing  she  can 
do  that  will  really  make  new  tracks  altogether.  The 
thing  that,  before  any  other,  will  be  wise  and  right. 
The  thing  that  will  best  give  her  the  chance  to  be 
magnificent." 

87 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

He  slowly  emitted  his  smoke.   "And  best  give  you, 
by  the  same  token,  yours  to  be  magnificent  with  her  ? " 
"I  shall  be  as  magnificent  at  least  as  I  can." 
Bob  Assingham  got  up.    "And  you  call  me  im 
moral?" 

It  made  her  hesitate  a  moment.  "I'll  call  you 
stupid  if  you  prefer.  But  stupidity  pushed  to  a  certain 
point  is,  you  know,  immorality.  Just  so  what  is 
morality  but  high  intelligence  ? "  This  he  was  unable 
to  tell  her;  which  left  her  more  definitely  to  conclude. 
"Besides,  it's  all,  at  the  worst,  great  fun." 
"Oh  if  you  simply  put  it  at  that—I" 
His  implication  was  that  in  this  case  they  had  a 
common  ground;  yet  even  thus  he  could  n't  catch  her 
by  it.  "Oh  I  don't  mean,"  she  said  from  the  threshold, 
"the  fun  that  you  mean.  Good-night."  In  answer  to 
which,  as  he  turned  out  the  electric  light,  he  gave  an 
odd  short  groan,  almost  a  grunt.  He  bad  apparently 
meant  some  particular  kind. 


"WELL,  now  I  must  tell  you,  for  I  want  to  be  abso 
lutely  honest."  So  Charlotte  spoke,  a  little  ominously, 
after  they  had  got  into  the  Park.  "I  don't  want  to 
pretend,  and  I  can't  pretend  a  moment  longer.  You 
may  think  of  me  what  you  will,  but  I  don't  care.  I 
knew  I  should  n't  and  I  find  now  how  little.  I  came 
back  for  this.  Not  really  for  anything  else.  For  this,'* 
she  repeated  as  under  the  influence  of  her  tone  the 
Prince  had  already  come  to  a  pause. 

"For  'this'  ?"  He  spoke  as  if  the  particular  thing 
she  indicated  were  vague  to  him — or  were,  rather,  a 
quantity  that  could  n't  at  the  most  be  much. 

It  would  be  as  much  however  as  she  should  be  able 
to  make  it.  "To  have  one  hour  alone  with  you." 

It  had  rained  heavily  in  the  night,  and  though  the 
pavements  were  now  dry,  thanks  to  a  cleansing  breeze, 
the  August  morning,  with  its  hovering  thick-drifting 
clouds  and  freshened  air,  was  cool  and  grey.  The 
multitudinous  green  of  the  Park  had  been  deepened, 
and  a  wholesome  smell  of  irrigation,  purging  the  place 
of  dust  and  of  odours  less  acceptable,  rose  from  the 
earth.  Charlotte  had  looked  about  her  with  expres 
sion  from  the  first  of  their  coming  in,  quite  as  if  for 
a  deep  greeting,  for  general  recognition  :  the  day  was, 
even  in  the  heart  of  London,  of  a  rich  low-browed 
weather-washed  English  type.  It  was  as  if  it  had  been 
waiting  for  her,  as  if  she  knew  it,  placed  it,  loved  it,  as 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

if  it  were  in  fact  a  part  of  what  she  had  come  back  for. 
So  far  as  this  was  the  case  the  impression  of  course 
could  only  be  lost  on  a  mere  vague  Italian ;  it  was  one 
of  those  for  which  you  had  to  be  blessedly  an  Ameri 
can —  as  indeed  you  had  to  be  blessedly  an  American 
for  all  sorts  of  things :  so  long  as  you  had  n't,  blessedly 
or  not,  to  remain  in  America.  The  Prince  had  by 
half-past  ten  —  as  also  by  definite  appointment  — 
called  in  Cadogan  Place  for  Mrs.  Assingham's  visitor, 
and  then  after  brief  delay  the  two  had  walked  to 
gether  up  Sloane  Street  and  got  straight  into  the  Park 
from  Knightsbridge.  The  understanding  to  this  end 
had  taken  its  place,  after  a  couple  of  days,  as  inevit 
ably  consequent  on  the  appeal  made  by  the  girl  during 
those  first  moments  in  Mrs.  Assingham's  drawing- 
room.  It  was  an  appeal  the  couple  of  days  had  done 
nothing  to  invalidate — everything  much  rather  to 
place  in  a  light,  and  as  to  which  it  obviously  would  n't 
have  fitted  that  any  one  should  raise  an  objection. 
Who  was  there  for  that  matter  to  raise  one  from  the 
moment  Mrs.  Assingham,  informed  and  apparently 
not  disapproving,  did  n't  intervene  ?  This  the  young 
man  had  asked  himself — with  a  very  sufficient  sense 
of  what  would  have  made  him  ridiculous.  He  was  n't 
going  to  begin — that  at  least  was  certain  — by  show 
ing  a  fear.  Even  had  fear  at  first  been  sharp  in  him, 
moreover,  it  would  already,  not  a  little,  have  dropped ; 
so  happy,  all  round,  so  propitious,  he  quite  might  have 
called  it,  had  been  the  effect  of  this  rapid  interval. 

The  time  had  been  taken  up  largely  by  his  active 
reception  of  his  own  wedding-guests  and  by  Maggie's 
scarce  less  absorbed  entertainment  of  her  friend, 

90 


THE   PRINCE 

whom  she  had  kept  for  hours  together  in  Portland 
Place ;  whom  she  had  n't,  as  would  n't  have  been  con 
venient,  invited  altogether  as  yet  to  migrate,  but  who 
had  been  present  with  other  persons,  his  contingent, 
at  luncheon,  at  tea,  at  dinner,  at  perpetual  repasts  — 
he  had  never  in  his  life,  it  struck  him,  had  to  reckon 
with  so  much  eating  —  whenever  he  had  looked  in.  If 
he  had  n't  again  till  this  hour,  save  for  a  minute,  seen 
Charlotte  alone,  so,  positively,  all  the  while,  he  had  n't 
seen  even  Maggie;  and  if  therefore  he  had  n't  seen 
even  Maggie  nothing  was  more  natural  than  that  he 
should  n't  have  seen  Charlotte.  The  exceptional  min 
ute,  a  mere  snatch,  at  the  tail  of  the  others,  on  the 
huge  Portland  Place  staircase,  had  sufficiently  enabled 
the  girl  to  remind  him  —  so  ready  she  assumed  him  to 
be  — of  what  they  were  to  do.  Time  pressed  if  they 
were  to  do  it  at  all.  Every  one  had  brought  gifts;  his 
relations  had  brought  wonders — how  did  they  still 
have,  where  did  they  still  find,  such  treasures  ?  She 
only  had  brought  nothing,  and  she  was  ashamed ;  yet 
even  by  the  sight  of  the  rest  of  the  tribute  she  would  n't 
be  put  off.  She  would  do  what  she  could,  and  he  was, 
unknown  to  Maggie,  he  must  remember,  to  give  her 
his  aid.  He  had  prolonged  the  minute  so  far  as  to 
take  time  to  hesitate  for  a  reason,  and  then  to  risk 
bringing  his  reason  out.  The  risk  was  because  he 
might  hurt  her — hurt  her  pride,  if  she  had  that  par 
ticular  sort.  But  she  might  as  well  be  hurt  one  way 
as  another;  and,  besides,  that  particular  sort  of  pride 
was  just  what  she  had  n't.  So  his  slight  resistance 
while  they  lingered  had  been  just  easy  enough  not  to 
be  impossible. 

91 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"I  hate  to  encourage  you  —  and  for  such  a  purpose, 
after  all — to  spend  your  money." 

She  had  stood  a  stair  or  two  below  him;  where, 
while  she  looked  up  at  him  beneath  the  high  domed 
light  of  the  hall,  she  rubbed  with  her  palm  the  pol 
ished  mahogany  of  the  balustrade,  which  was 
mounted  on  fine  ironwork,  eighteenth-century  Eng 
lish.  "Because  you  think  I  must  have  so  little  ?  I  've 
enough,  at  any  rate — enough  for  us  to  take  our  hour. 
Enough,"  she  had  smiled,  "is  as  good  as  a  feast! 
And  then,"  she  had  said,  "  it  is  n't  of  course  a  question 
of  anything  expensive,  gorged  with  treasure  as  Mag 
gie  is;  it  is  n't  a  question  of  competing  or  outshining. 
What,  naturally,  in  the  way  of  the  priceless,  has  n't 
she  got  ?  Mine  is  to  be  the  offering  of  the  poor  — • 
something  precisely  that  no  rich  person  could  ever 
give  her,  and  that,  being  herself  too  rich  ever  to  buy  it, 
she  would  therefore  never  have."  Charlotte  had 
spoken  as  if  after  so  much  thought.  "  Only  as  it  can't 
be  fine  it  ought  to  be  funny  —  and  that's  the  sort  of 
thing  to  hunt  for.  Hunting  in  London,  besides,  is 
amusing  in  itself." 

He  recalled  even  how  he  had  been  struck  with  her 
word.  "Tunny'?" 

"Oh  I  don't  mean  a  comic  toy — I  mean  some  little 
thing  with  a  charm.  But  absolutely  right,  in  its  com 
parative  cheapness.  That's  what  I  call  funny,"  she 
had  explained.  "You  used,"  she  had  also  added,  "to 
help  me  to  get  things  cheap  in  Rome.  You  were  splen 
did  for  beating  down.  I  have  them  all  still,  I  need  n't 
say — the  little  bargains  I  there  owed  you.  There  are 
bargains  in  London  in  August." 

92 


THE  PRINCE 

"Ah  but  I  don't  understand  your  English  buying, 
and  I  confess  I  find  it  dull."  So  much  as  that,  while 
they  turned  to  go  up  together,  he  had  objected.  "I 
understood  my  poor  dear  Romans." 

"It  was  they  who  understood  you — that  was  your 
pull,"  she  had  laughed.  "Our  amusement  here  is  just 
that  they  don't  understand  us.  We  can  make  it  amus 
ing.  You'll  see." 

If  he  had  hesitated  again  it  was  because  the  point 
permitted.  "The  amusement  surely  will  be  to  find 
our  present." 

"Certainly  —  as  I  say." 

"Well,  if  they  don't  come  down — ?" 

"Then  we'll  come  up.  There's  always  something 
to  be  done.  Besides,  Prince,"  she  had  gone  on,  "I  'm 
not,  if  you  come  to  that,  absolutely  a  pauper.  I  'm  too 
poor  for  some  things,"  she  had  said — yet,  strange  as 
she  was,  lightly  enough ;  "  but  I  'm  not  too  poor  for 
others."  And  she  had  paused  again  at  the  top.  "I 've 
been  saving  up." 

He  had  really  challenged  it.    "In  America?" 

"Yes,  even  there — with  my  motive.  And  we 
ought  n't,  you  know,"  she  had  wound  up,  "to  leave  it 
beyond  to-morrow." 

That,  definitely,  with  ten  words  more,  was  what 
had  passed — he  feeling  all  the  while  how  any  sort  of 
begging-oflF  would  only  magnify  it.  He  might  get  on 
with  things  as  they  were,  but  he  must  do  anything 
rather  than  magnify.  Beyond  which  it  was  pitiful  to 
make  her  beg  of  him.  He  was  making  her  —  she  had 
begged;  and  this,  for  a  special  sensibility  in  him, 
did  n't  at  all  do.  That  was  accordingly  in  fine  how 

93 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

they  had  come  to  where  they  were :  he  was  engaged 
as  hard  as  possible  in  the  policy  of  not  magnifying. 
He  had  kept  this  up  even  on  her  making  the  point, 
and  as  if  it  were  almost  the  whole  point,  that  Maggie 
of  course  was  n't  to  have  an  idea.  Half  the  inter 
est  of  the  thing  at  least  would  be  that  she  should  n't 
suspect;  therefore  he  was  completely  to  keep  it  from 
her  —  as  Charlotte  on  her  side  would  —  that  they  had 
been  anywhere  at  all  together  or  had  so  much  as  seen 
each  other  for  five  minutes  alone.  The  absolute 
secrecy  of  their  little  excursion  was  in  short  of  the 
essence;  she  appealed  to  his  kindness  to  let  her  feel 
that  he  did  n't  betray  her.  There  had  been  something, 
frankly,  a  little  disconcerting  in  such  an  appeal  at 
such  an  hour,  on  the  very  eve  of  his  nuptials :  it  was 
one  thing  to  have  met  the  girl  casually  at  Mrs.  Assing- 
ham's  and  another  to  arrange  with  her  thus  for  a 
morning  practically  as  private  as  their  old  mornings 
in  Rome  and  practically  not  less  intimate.  He  had 
immediately  told  Maggie,  the  same  evening,  of  the 
minutes  that  had  passed  between  them  in  Cadogan 
Place — though  not  mentioning  those  of  Mrs.  Assing- 
ham's  absence  any  more  than  he  mentioned  the  fact 
of  what  their  friend  had  then,  with  such  small  delay, 
proposed.  But  what  had  briefly  checked  his  assent  to 
any  present,  to  any  positive  making  of  mystery  — 
what  had  made  him,  while  they  stood  at  the  top  of  the 
stairs,  demur  just  long  enough  for  her  to  notice  it  — 
was  the  sense  of  the  resemblance  of  the  little  plan  be 
fore  him  to  occasions,  of  the  past,  from  which  he  was 
quite  disconnected,  from  which  he  could  only  desire 
to  be.  This  was  like  beginning  something  over,  which 

94 


THE  PRINCE 

was  the  last  thing  he  wanted.  The  strength,  the 
beauty  of  his  actual  position  was  in  its  being  wholly  a 
fresh  start,  was  that  what  it  began  would  be  new  alto 
gether.  These  items  of  his  consciousness  had  clus 
tered  so  quickly  that  by  the  time  Charlotte  read  them 
in  his  face  he  was  in  presence  of  what  they  amounted 
to.  She  had  challenged  them  as  soon  as  read  them, 
had  met  them  with  a  "  Do  you  want  then  to  go  and  tell 
her  ? "  that  had  somehow  made  them  ridiculous.  It 
had  made  him  promptly  fall  back  on  minimising  it  — 
that  is  on  minimising  "  fuss."  Apparent  scruples  were 
obviously  fuss,  and  he  had  on  the  spot  clutched,  in  the 
light  of  this  truth,  at  the  happy  principle  that  would 
meet  every  case. 

This  principle  was  simply  to  be,  with  the  girl, 
always  simple  —  and  with  the  very  last  simplicity. 
That  would  cover  everything.  It  had  covered  then  and 
there  certainly  his  immediate  submission  to  the  sight 
of  what  was  clearest.  This  was  really  that  what  she 
asked  was  little  compared  to  what  she  gave.  What 
she  gave  touched  him,  as  she  faced  him,  for  it  was  the 
full  tune  of  her  renouncing.  She  really  renounced  — 
renounced  everything,  and  without  even  insisting  now 
on  what  it  had  all  been  for  her.  Her  only  insistence 
was  her  insistence  on  the  small  matter  of  their  keeping 
their  appointment  to  themselves.  That,  in  exchange 
for  "everything,"  everything  she  gave  up,  was  verily 
but  a  trifle.  He  let  himself  accordingly  be  guided;  he 
so  soon  assented,  for  enlightened  indulgence,  to  any 
particular  turn  she  might  wish  the  occasion  to  take, 
that  the  stamp  of  her  preference  had  been  well  applied 
to  it  even  while  they  were  still  in  the  Park.  The  appli- 

95 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

cation  in  fact  presently  required  that  they  should  sit 
down  a  little,  really  to  see  where  they  were ;  in  obedi 
ence  to  which  propriety  they  had  some  ten  minutes, 
of  a  quality  quite  distinct,  in  a  couple  of  penny-chairs 
under  one  of  the  larger  trees.  They  had  taken,  for 
their  walk,  to  the  cropped  rain-freshened  grass,  after 
finding  it  already  dry;  and  the  chairs,  turned  away 
from  the  broad  alley,  the  main  drive  and  the  aspect  of 
Park  Lane,  looked  across  the  wide  reaches  of  green 
which  seemed  in  a  manner  to  refine  upon  their  free 
dom.  They  helped  Charlotte  thus  to  make  her  posi 
tion — her  temporary  position  —  still  more  clear,  and 
it  for  this  purpose  could  have  been  but  that,  abruptly, 
on  seeing  her  opportunity,  she  sat  down.  He  stood  for 
a  little  before  her  as  if  to  mark  the  importance  of  not 
wasting  time,  the  importance  she  herself  had  pre 
viously  insisted  on;  but  after  she  had  said  a  few  words 
it  was  impossible  for  him  not  to  resort  again  to  good 
nature.  He  marked  as  he  could,  by  this  concession, 
that  if  he  had  finally  met  her  first  proposal  for  what 
would  be  "amusing"  in  it,  so  any  idea  she  might 
have  would  contribute  to  that  effect.  He  had  as  a 
consequence  —  in  all  consistency — to  take  it  for 
amusing  that  she  reaffirmed,  and  reaffirmed  again,  the 
truth  that  was  her  truth. 

"  I  don't  care  what  you  make  of  it,  and  I  don't  ask 
anything  whatever  of  you  —  anything  but  this.  I 
want  to  have  said  it  —  that's  all;  I  want  not  to  have 
failed  to  say  it.  To  see  you  once  and  be  with  you,  to 
be  as  we  are  now  and  as  we  used  to  be,  for  one  small 
hour  —  or  say  for  two  —  that 's  what  I  've  had  for 
weeks  in  my  head.  I  mean,  of  course,  to  get  it  before  — 


THE  PRINCE 

before  what  you  're  going  to  do.  So,  all  the  while,  you 
see,"  she  went  on  with  her  eyes  on  him,  "  it  was  a  ques 
tion  for  me  if  I  should  be  able  to  manage  it  in  time. 
If  I  could  n't  have  come  now  I  probably  should  n't 
have  come  at  all  —  perhaps  even  ever.  Now  that  I  'm 
here  I  shall  stay,  but  there  were  moments  over  there 
when  I  despaired.  It  was  n't  easy  —  there  were  rea 
sons;  but  it  was  either  this  or  nothing.  So  I  did  n't 
struggle,  you  see,  in  vain.  After  —  oh  I  did  n't  want 
that!  I  don't  mean,"  she  smiled,  "that  it  would  n't 
have  been  delightful  to  see  you  even  then  — to  see  you 
at  any  time;  but  I  would  never  have  come  for  it.  This 
is  different.  This  is  what  I  wanted.  This  is  what  I  've 
got.  This  is  what  I  shall  always  have.  This  is  what 
I  should  have  missed,  of  course,"  she  pursued,  "if 
you  had  chosen  to  make  me  miss  it.  If  you  had 
thought  me  horrid,  had  refused  to  come,  I  should, 
naturally,  have  been  immensely  'sold.'  I  had  to  take 
the  risk.  Well,  you  're  all  I  could  have  hoped.  That 's 
what  I  was  to  have  said.  I  did  n't  want  simply  to  get 
my  time  with  you,  but  I  wanted  you  to  know.  I 
wanted  you  "  —  she  kept  it  up,  slowly,  softly,  with  a 
small  tremor  of  voice  but  without  the  least  failure  of 
sense  or  sequence  —  "I  wanted  you  to  understand. 
I  wanted  you,  that  is,  to  hear.  I  don't  care,  I  think, 
whether  you  understand  or  not.  If  I  ask  nothing  of 
you  I  don't  —  I  may  n't  —  ask  even  so  much  as  that. 
What  you  may  think  of  me  —  that  does  n't  in  the 
least  matter.  What  I  want  is  that  it  shall  always  be 
with  you  —  so  that  you  '11  never  be  able  quite  to  get 
rid  of  it  —  that  I  did.  I  won't  say  that  you  did  —  you 
may  make  as  little  of  that  as  you  like.  But  that  I  was 

97 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

here  with  you  where  we  are  and  as  we  are  —  I  just 
saying  this.  Giving  myself,  in  other  words,  away  — 
and  perfectly  willing  to  do  it  for  nothing.  That 's  all." 
She  paused  as  if  her  demonstration  was  complete  — 
yet  for  the  moment  without  moving ;  as  if  in  fact  to 
give  it  a  few  minutes  to  sink  in ;  into  the  listening  air, 
into  the  watching  space,  into  the  conscious  hospitality 
of  nature,  so  far  as  nature  was,  all  Londonised,  all 
vulgarised,  with  them  there;  or  even  for  that  matter 
into  her  own  open  ears  rather  than  into  the  attention 
of  her  passive  and  prudent  friend.  His  attention  had 
done  all  that  attention  could  do;  his  handsome 
slightly  anxious,  yet  still  more  definitely  "amused" 
face  sufficiently  played  its  part.  He  clutched,  how 
ever,  at  what  he  could  best  clutch  at  —  the  fact  that 
she  let  him  off,  definitely  let  him  off.  She  let  him  off, 
it  seemed,  even  from  so  much  as  answering;  so  that 
while  he  smiled  back  at  her  in  return  for  her  informa 
tion  he  felt  his  lips  remain  closed  to  the  successive 
vaguenesses  of  rejoinder,  of  objection,  that  rose  for 
him  from  within.  Charlotte  herself  spoke  again  at 
last  —  "  You  may  want  to  know  what  I  get  by  it.  But 
that's  my  own  affair."  He  really  did  n't  want  to  know 
even  this  —  or  continued,  for  the  safest  plan,  quite  to 
behave  as  if  he  did  n't;  which  prolonged  the  mere 
dumbness  of  diversion  in  which  he  had  taken  refuge. 
He  was  glad  when  finally  —  the  point  she  had  wished 
to  make  seeming  established  to  her  satisfaction  — 
they  brought  to  what  might  pass  for  a  close  the  mo 
ment  of  his  life  at  which  he  had  had  least  to  say. 
Movement  and  progress,  after  this,  with  more  imper 
sonal  talk,  were  naturally  a  relief;  so  that  he  was  n't 

98 


THE   PRINCE 

again  during  their  excursion  at  a  loss  for  the  right 
word.  The  air  had  been,  as  it  were,  cleared;  they  had 
their  errand  itself  to  discuss,  and  the  opportunities  of 
London,  the  sense  of  the  wonderful  place,  the  pleas 
ures  of  prowling  there,  the  question  of  shops,  of  pos 
sibilities,  of  particular  objects,  noticed  by  each  in  pre 
vious  prowls.  Each  professed  surprise  at  the  extent 
of  the  other's  knowledge;  the  Prince  in  especial  won 
dered  at  his  friend's  possession  of  her  London.  He 
had  rather  prized  his  own  possession,  the  guidance  he 
could  really  often  give  a  cabman ;  it  was  a  whim  of  his 
own,  a  part  of  his  Anglomania  and  congruous  with 
that  feature,  which  had  after  all  so  much  more  surface 
than  depth.  When  his  companion,  with  the  memory 
of  other  visits  and  other  rambles,  spoke  of  places  he 
had  n't  seen  and  things  he  did  n't  know,  he  actually 
felt  again  —  as  half  the  effect — just  a  shade  humil 
iated.  He  might  even  have  felt  a  trifle  annoyed  — if 
it  had  n't  been,  on  this  spot,  for  his  being  even  more 
interested.  It  was  a  fresh  light  on  Charlotte  and  on 
her  curious  world-quality,  of  which  in  Rome  he  had 
had  his  due  sense,  but  which  clearly  would  show 
larger  on  the  big  London  stage.  Rome  was  in  com 
parison  a  village,  a  family-party,  a  little  old-world 
spinnet  for  the  fingers  of  one  hand.  By  the  time  they 
reached  the  Marble  Arch  it  was  almost  as  if  she  were 
showing  him  a  new  side,  and  that  in  fact  gave  amuse 
ment  a  new  and  a  firmer  basis.  The  right  tone  would 
be  easy  for  putting  himself  in  her  hands.  Should  they 
disagree  a  little  —  frankly  and  fairly — about  direc 
tions  and  chances,  values  and  authenticities,  the  situa 
tion  would  be  quite  gloriously  saved.  They  were  none 

99 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

the  less,  as  happened,  much  of  one  mind  on  the  article 
of  their  keeping  clear  of  resorts  with  which  Maggie 
would  be  acquainted.  Charlotte  recalled  it  as  a  mat 
ter  of  course,  named  it  in  time  as  a  condition  —  they 
would  keep  away  from  any  place  to  which  he  had 
already  been  with  Maggie. 

This  made  indeed  a  scant  difference,  for  though  he 
had  during  the  last  month  done  few  things  so  much  as 
attend  his  future  wife  on  her  making  of  purchases,  the 
antiquarii,  as  he  called  them  with  Charlotte,  had  n't 
been  the  great  affair.  Except  in  Bond  Street,  really, 
Maggie  had  had  no  use  for  them:  her  situation  in 
deed  in  connexion  with  that  order  of  traffic  was  full 
of  consequences  produced  by  her  father's.  Mr.  Verver, 
one  of  the  great  collectors  of  the  world,  had  n't  left  his 
daughter  to  prowl  for  herself;  he  had  little  to  do  with 
shops  and  was  mostly,  as  a  purchaser,  approached  pri 
vately  and  from  afar.  Great  people,  all  over  Europe, 
sought  introductions  to  him ;  high  personages,  incredi 
bly  high,  and  more  of  them  than  would  ever  be  known, 
solemnly  sworn  as  every  one  was,  in  such  cases,  to  dis 
cretion,  high  personages  made  up  to  him  as  the  one 
man  on  the  short  authentic  list  likely  to  give  the  price. 
It  had  therefore  been  easy  to  settle,  as  they  walked, 
that  the  tracks  of  the  Ververs,  daughter's  as  well  as 
father's,  were  to  be  avoided ;  the  importance  only  was 
that  their  talk  about  it  led  for  a  moment  to  the  first 
words  they  had  as  yet  exchanged  on  the  subject  of 
Maggie.  Charlotte,  still  in  the  Park,  proceeded  to 
them  —  for  it  was  she  who  began — with  a  serenity  of 
appreciation  that  was  odd,  certainly,  as  a  sequel  to  her 
words  of  ten  minutes  before.  This  was  another  note 

100 


THE   PRINCE 

on  her  —  what  he  would  have  called  another  light  — 
to  her  companion,  who,  though  without  giving  a  sign, 
admired,  for  what  it  was,  the  simplicity  of  her  transi 
tion,  a  transition  that  took  no  trouble  either  to  trace 
or  to  explain  itself.  She  paused  again  an  instant  on 
the  grass  to  make  it;  she  stopped  before  him  with  a 
sudden  "Anything  of  course,  dear  as  she  is,  will  do 
for  her.  I  mean  if  I  were  to  give  her  a  pin-cushion 
from  the  Baker-Street  Bazaar." 

"That's  exactly  what  /  mean"  — the  Prince 
laughed  out  this  allusion  to  their  snatch  of  talk  in 
Portland  Place.  "It's  just  what  I  suggested." 

She  took,  however,  no  notice  of  the  reminder;  she 
went  on  in  her  own  way.  "  But  it  is  n't  a  reason.  In 
that  case  one  would  never  do  anything  for  her.  I 
mean,"  Charlotte  explained,  "  if  one  took  advantage 
of  her  character." 

"Of  her  character?" 

"We  must  n't  take  advantage  of  her  character,"  the 
girl,  again  unheeding,  pursued.  "One  must  n't,  if  not 
for  her,  at  least  for  one's  self.  She  saves  one  such 
trouble." 

She  had  spoken  thoughtfully,  her  eyes  on  her 
friend's;  she  might  have  been  talking,  preoccupied 
and  practical,  of  some  one  with  whom  he  was  com 
paratively  unconnected.  "She  certainly  gives  one  no 
trouble,"  said  the  Prince.  And  then  as  if  this  were 
perhaps  ambiguous  or  inadequate:  "She's  not  selfish 
— God  forgive  her!  — enough." 

"That's  what  I  mean,"  Charlotte  instantly  said. 
"She's  not  selfish  enough.  There's  nothing,  abso 
lutely,  that  one  need  do  for  her.  She 's  so  modest,"  she 

101 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

developed  —  "she  does  n't  miss  things.  I  mean  if  you 
love  her — or  rather,  I  should  say,  if  she  loves  you. 
She  lets  it  go." 

The  Prince  frowned  a  little — as  a  tribute  after  all 
to  seriousness.  "She  lets  what — ?" 

"Anything  — anything  that  you  might  do  and  that 
you  don't.  She  lets  everything  go  but  her  own  dis 
position  to  be  kind  to  you.  It 's  of  herself  that  she  asks 
efforts — so  far  as  she  ever  has  to  ask  them.  She 
has  n't,  much.  She  does  everything  herself.  And 
that's  terrible." 

The  Prince  had  listened;  but,  always  with  propri 
ety,  did  n't  commit  himself.  "Terrible?" 

"Well,  unless  one's  almost  as  good  as  she.  It 
makes  too  easy  terms  for  one.  It  takes  stuff  within 
one,  so  far  as  one's  decency  is  concerned,  to  stand  it. 
And  nobody,"  Charlotte  continued  in  the  same  man 
ner,  "is  decent  enough,  good  enough,  to  stand  it — • 
not  without  help  from  religion  or  something  of  that 
kind.  Not  without  prayer  and  fasting  —  that  is  with 
out  taking  great  care.  Certainly,"  she  said,  "such 
people  as  you  and  I  are  not." 

The  Prince,  obligingly,  thought  an  instant.  "Not 
good  enough  to  stand  it  ? " 

"  Well,  not  good  enough  not  rather  to  feel  the  strain. 
We  happen  each,  I  think,  to  be  of  the  kind  that  are 
easily  spoiled." 

Her  friend  again,  for  propriety,  followed  the  argu 
ment.  "Oh  I  don't  know.  May  not  one's  affection 
for  her  do  something  more  for  one's  decency,  as  you 
call  it,  than  her  own  generosity  —  her  own  affection, 
her '  decency '  —  has  the  unfortunate  virtue  to  undo  ? " 

1 02 


THE  PRINCE 

"Ah  of  course  it  must  be  all  in  that." 

But  she  had  made  her  question,  all  the  same,  inter 
esting  to  him.  "What  it  comes  to — one  can  see  what 
you  mean — is  the  way  she  believes  in  one.  That  is  if 
she  believes  at  all." 

"Yes,  that's  what  it  comes  to,"  said  Charlotte 
Stant. 

"And  why,"  he  asked  almost  soothingly,  "should  it 
be  terrible  ? "  He  could  n't  at  the  worst  see  that. 

"Because  it's  always  so — the  idea  of  having  to 
pity  people." 

"  Not  when  there 's  also  with  it  the  idea  of  helping 
them." 

"  Yes,  but  if  we  can't  help  them  ? " 

"We  can — we  always  can.  That  is,"  he  compe 
tently  added,  "if  we  care  for  them.  And  that's  what 
we're  talking  about." 

"Yes" — she  on  the  whole  assented.  "It  comes 
back  then  to  our  absolutely  refusing  to  be  spoiled." 

"Certainly.  But  everything,"  the  Prince  laughed 
as  they  went  on  — "all  your  'decency/  I  mean  — 
comes  back  to  that." 

She  walked  beside  him  a  moment.  "  It 's  just  what 
/  meant,"  she  then  reasonably  said. 


VI 


THE  man  in  the  little  shop  in  which,  well  after  this, 
they  lingered  longest,  the  small  but  interesting  dealer 
in  the  Bloomsbury  street  who  was  remarkable  for  an 
insistence  not  importunate,  inasmuch  as  it  was  mainly 
mute,  but  singularly,  intensely  coercive — this  per 
sonage  fixed  on  his  visitors  an  extraordinary  pair  of 
eyes  and  looked  from  one  to  the  other  while  they  con 
sidered  the  object  with  which  he  appeared  mainly  to 
hope  to  tempt  them.  They  had  come  to  him  last,  for 
their  time  was  nearly  up ;  an  hour  of  it  at  least,  from 
the  moment  of  their  getting  into  a  hansom  at  the 
Marble  Arch,  having  yielded  no  better  result  than  the 
amusement  invoked  from  the  first.  The  amusement 
of  course  was  to  have  consisted  in  seeking,  but  it  had 
also  involved  the  idea  of  finding;  which  latter  neces 
sity  would  have  been  obtrusive  only  if  they  had  found 
too  soon.  The  question  at  present  was  if  they  were 
finding,  and  they  put  it  to  each  other,  in  the  Blooms- 
bury  shop,  while  they  enjoyed  the  undiverted  atten 
tion  of  the  shopman.  He  was  clearly  the  master  and 
devoted  to  his  business — the  essence  of  which,  in  his 
conception,  might  precisely  have  been  this  particular 
secret  that  he  possessed  for  worrying  the  customer  so 
little  that  it  fairly  threw  over  their  relation  a  sort  of 
solemnity.  He  had  n't  many  things,  none  of  the  re 
dundancy  of  "rot"  they  had  elsewhere  seen,  and  our 
friends  had,  on  entering,  even  had  the  sense  of  a 

104 


THE  PRINCE 

muster  so  scant  that,  as  high  values  obviously 
would  n't  reign,  the  effect  might  be  almost  pitiful. 
Then  their  impression  had  changed;  for,  though  the 
show  was  of  small  pieces,  several  taken  from  the  little 
window  and  others  extracted  from  a  cupboard  behind 
the  counter — dusky,  in  the  rather  low-browed  place, 
despite  its  glass  doors  —  each  bid  for  their  attention 
spoke,  however  modestly,  for  itself,  and  the  pitch  of 
their  entertainer's  pretensions  was  promptly  enough 
given.  His  array  was  heterogeneous  and  not  at  all 
imposing;  still  it  differed  agreeably  from  what  they 
had  hitherto  seen. 

Charlotte,  after  the  incident,  was  to  be  full  of  im 
pressions,  of  several  of  which,  later  on,  she  gave  her 
companion  —  always  in  the  interest  of  their  amuse 
ment — the  benefit;  and  one  of  the  impressions  had 
been  that  the  man  himself  was  the  greatest  curiosity 
they  had  looked  at.  The  Prince  was  to  reply  to  this 
that  he  himself  had  n't  looked  at  him;  as,  precisely,  in 
the  general  connexion,  Charlotte  had  more  than  once, 
from  other  days,  noted,  for  his  advantage,  her  con 
sciousness  of  how,  below  a  certain  social  plane,  he 
never  saw.  One  kind  of  shopman  was  just  like  another 
to  him — which  was  oddly  inconsequent  on  the  part 
of  a  mind  that  where  it  did  notice  noticed  so  much. 
;  He  took  throughout  always  the  meaner  sort  for 
'  granted — the  night  of  their  meanness,  or  whatever 
]  name  one  might  give  it  for  him,  made  all  his  cats 
grey.  He  did  n't,  no  doubt,  want  to  hurt  them,  but  he 
imaged  them  no  more  than  if  his  eyes  acted  only  for 
the  level  of  his  own  high  head.  Her  own  vision  acted 
for  every  relation — this  he  had  seen  for  himself:  she 

105 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

remarked  beggars,  she  remembered  servants,  she 
recognised  cabmen;  she  had  often  distinguished 
beauty,  when  out  with  him,  in  dirty  children ;  she  had 
admired  "type"  in  faces  at  hucksters'  stalls.  There 
fore  she  had  on  this  occasion  found  their  antiquario 
interesting;  partly  because  he  cared  so  for  his  things, 
and  partly  because  he  cared — well,  so  for  them.  "  He 
likes  his  things  —  he  loves  them,"  she  was  to  say; 
"and  it  is  n't  only  —  it  is  n't  perhaps  even  at  all  — 
that  he  loves  to  sell  them.  I  think  he  would  love  to 
keep  them  if  he  could;  and  he  prefers  at  any  rate  to 
sell  them  to  right  people.  We,  clearly,  were  right  peo 
ple  —  he  knows  them  when  he  sees  them ;  and  that 's 
why,  as  I  say,  you  could  make  out,  or  at  least  I  could, 
that  he  cared  for  us.  Did  n't  you  see"  —  she  was  to 
ask  it  with  an  insistence — "the  way  he  looked  at  us 
and  took  us  in  ?  I  doubt  if  either  of  us  have  ever  been 
so  well  looked  at  before.  Yes,  he  '11  remember  us  "  — 
she  was  to  profess  herself  convinced  of  that  almost  to 
uneasiness.  "  But  it  was  after  all "  —  this  was  per 
haps  reassuring  —  "because,  given  his  taste,  since  he 
has  taste,  he  was  pleased  with  us,  he  was  struck  —  he 
had  ideas  about  us.  Well,  I  should  think  people 
might ;  we  're  beautiful  —  are  n't  we  ?  —  and  he 
knows.  Then  also  he  has  his  way;  for  that  way  of 
saying  nothing  with  his  lips  when  he's  all  the  while 
pressing  you  so  with  his  face,  which  shows  how  he 
knows  you  feel  it  —  that  is  a  regular  way." 

Of  decent  old  gold,  old  silver,  old  bronze,  of  old 
chased  and  jewelled  artistry,  were  the  objects  that, 
successively  produced,  had  ended  by  numerously 
dotting  the  counter  where  the  shopman's  slim  light 

1 06 


THE  PRINCE 

fingers,  with  neat  nails,  touched  them  at  moments, 
briefly,  nervously,  tenderly,  as  those  of  a  chess-player 
rest,  a  few  seconds,  over  the  board,  on  a  figure  he 
thinks  he  may  move  and  then  may  not:  small  florid 
ancientries,  ornaments,  pendants,  lockets,  brooches, 
buckles,  pretexts  for  dim  brilliants,  bloodless  rubies, 
pearls  either  too  large  or  too  opaque  for  value ;  min 
iatures  mounted  with  diamonds  that  had  ceased  to 
dazzle ;  snuff-boxes  presented  to  —  or  by  —  the  too- 
questionable  great ;  cups,  trays,  taper-stands,  suggest 
ive  of  pawn-tickets,  archaic  and  brown,  that  would 
themselves,  if  preserved,  have  been  prized  curiosities. 
A  few  commemorative  medals  of  neat  outline  but  dull 
reference ;  a  classic  monument  or  two,  things  of  the 
first  years  of  the  century ;  things  consular,  Napoleonic, 
temples,  obelisks,  arches,  tinily  re-embodied,  com 
pleted  the  discreet  cluster;  in  which,  however,  even 
after  tentative  re-enforcement  from  several  quaint 
rings,  intaglios,  amethysts,  carbuncles,  each  of  which 
had  found  a  home  in  the  ancient  sallow  satin  of  some 
weakly-snapping  little  box,  there  was,  in  spite  of  the 
due  proportion  of  faint  poetry,  no  great  force  of  per 
suasion.  They  looked,  the  visitors,  they  touched,  they 
vaguely  pretended  to  consider,  but  with  scepticism,  so 
far  as  courtesy  permitted,  in  the  quality  of  their  atten 
tion.  It  was  impossible  they  should  n't,  after  a  little, 
tacitly  agree  as  to  the  absurdity  of  carrying  to  Maggie 
a  token  from  such  a  stock.  It  would  be — that  was 
the  difficulty — pretentious  without  being  "good"; 
too  usual,  as  a  treasure,  to  have  been  an  inspiration  of 
the  giver,  and  yet  too  primitive  to  be  taken  as  tribute 
welcome  on  any  terms.  They  had  been  out  more  than 

107 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

two  hours  and  evidently  had  found  nothing.  It  forced 
from  Charlotte  a  rueful  admission. 

"  It  ought,  really,  if  it  should  be  a  thing  of  this  sort, 
to  take  its  little  value  from  having  belonged  to  one's 
self." 

"Ecco!"  said  the  Prince  — just  triumphantly 
enough.  "There  you  are." 

Behind  the  dealer  were  sundry  small  cupboards  in 
the  wall.  Two  or  three  of  these  Charlotte  had  seen 
him  open,  so  that  her  eyes  found  themselves  resting  on 
those  he  had  n't  visited.  But  she  granted  the  whole 
mistake.  "There's  nothing  here  she  could  wear." 

It  was  only  after  a  moment  that  her  companion 
rejoined:  "Is  there  anything — do  you  think — that 
you  could  ? " 

It  made  her  just  start.  She  did  n't  at  all  events  look 
at  the  objects;  she  but  looked  for  an  instant  very 
directly  at  him.  "No." 

"Ah!"  the  Prince  quietly  exclaimed. 

"Would  it  be,"  Charlotte  asked,  "your  idea  to  offer 
me  something  ? " 

"Well,  why  not  — as  a  small  ricordo  ?" 

"  But  a  ricordo  of  what  ? " 

"  Why  of '  this '  —  as  you  yourself  say.  Of  this  little 
hunt." 

"  Oh  I  say  it  —  but  has  n't  my  whole  point  been  that 
I  don't  ask  you  to.  Therefore,"  she  demanded  —  but 
smiling  at  him  now — " where 's  the  logic?" 

"Oh  the  logic — !"  he  laughed. 

"  But  logic 's  everything.  That  at  least  is  how  I  feel 
it.  A  ricordo  from  you  —  from  you  to  me  —  is  a 
ricordo  of  nothing.  It  has  no  reference." 

108 


THE  PRINCE 

"Ah  my  dear ! "  he  vaguely  protested.  Their  enter 
tainer  meanwhile  stood  there  with  his  eyes  on  them, 
and  the  girl,  though  at  this  minute  more  interested  in 
her  passage  with  her  friend  than  in  anything  else, 
again  met  his  gaze.  It  was  a  comfort  to  her  that  their 
foreign  tongue  covered  what  they  said  —  and  they 
might  have  appeared  of  course,  as  the  Prince  now  had 
one  of  the  snuff-boxes  in  his  hand,  to  be  discussing 
a  purchase. 

"You  don't  refer,"  she  went  on  to  her  companion. 
"/  refer." 

He  had  lifted  the  lid  of  his  little  box  and  he  looked 
into  it  hard.  "Do  you  mean  by  that  then  that  you 
would  be  free  —  ? " 

"'Free'  —  ?" 

"To  offer  me  something?" 

This  gave  her  a  longer  pause,  and  when  she  spoke 
again  she  might  have  seemed,  oddly,  to  be  addressing 
the  dealer.  "Would  you  allow  me  —  ?" 

"No,"  said  the  Prince  into  his  little  box. 

"You  would  n't  accept  it  from  me  ?" 

"No,"  he  repeated  in  the  same  way. 

She  exhaled  a  long  breath  that  was  like  a  guarded 
sigh.  "  But  you  've  touched  an  idea  that  has  been 
mine.  It 's  what  I  Ve  wanted."  Then  she  added :  "  It 
was  what  I  hoped." 

He  put  down  his  box  —  this  had  drawn  his  eyes. 
He  made  nothing,  clearly,  of  the  little  man's  attention. 
"  It 's  what  you  brought  me  out  for  ? " 

"  Well,  that 's  at  any  rate,"  she  returned,  "  my  own 
affair.  But  it  won't  do  ?" 

"It  won't  do,  cara  mia." 
109 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"  It 's  impossible  ? " 

"It's  impossible."  And  he  took  up  one  of  the 
brooches. 

She  had  another  pause,  while  the  shopman  only 
waited.  "  If  I  were  to  accept  from  you  one  of  these 
charming  little  ornaments  as  you  suggest,  what  should 
I  do  with  it  ? " 

He  was  perhaps  at  last  a  little  irritated ;  he  even  — 
as  if  be  might  understand  —  looked  vaguely  across  at 
their  host.  "Wear  it,  per  Bacco!" 

"Where  then,  please?   Under  my  clothes?" 

"Wherever  you  like.  But  it  is  n't  then,  if  you  will," 
he  added,  "worth  talking  about." 

"It's  only  worth  talking  about,  mio  caro,"  she 
smiled,  "from  your  having  begun  it.  My  question  is 
only  reasonable  —  so  that  your  idea  may  stand  or  fall 
by  your  answer  to  it.  If  I  should  pin  one  of  these 
things  on  for  you  would  it  be,  to  your  mind,  that  I 
might  go  home  and  show  it  to  Maggie  as  your  pre 
sent?" 

They  had  had  between  them  often  in  talk  the 
refrain,  jocosely,  descriptively  applied,  of  "old- 
Roman."  It  had  been,  as  a  pleasantry,  in  the  other 
time,  his  explanation  to  her  of  everything;  but  no 
thing  truly  had  even  seemed  so  old-Roman  as  the 
shrug  in  which  he  now  indulged.  "Why  in  the  world 
not?" 

"  Because  —  on  our  basis  —  it  would  be  impossible 
to  give  her  an  account  of  the  pretext." 

"The  pretext  —  ?"   He  wondered. 

"  The  occasion.  This  ramble  that  we  shall  have  had 
together  and  that  we're  not  to  speak  of." 

110 


THE   PRINCE 

"Oh  yes,"  he  said  after  a  moment  —  "I  remember 
we  're  not  to  speak  of  it." 

"That  of  course  you're  pledged  to.  And  the  one 
thing,  you  see,  goes  with  the  other.  So  you  don't 
insist." 

He  had  again,  at  random,  laid  back  his  trinket; 
with  which  he  quite  turned  to  her  a  little  wearily  at 
last  —  even  a  little  impatiently.  "I  don't  insist." 

It  disposed  for  the  time  of  the  question,  but  what 
was  next  apparent  was  that  it  had  seen  them  no 
further.  The  shopman,  who  had  n't  stirred,  stood 
there  in  his  patience  —  which,  his  mute  intensity 
helping,  had  almost  the  effect  of  an  ironic  comment. 
The  Prince  moved  to  the  glass  door  and,  his  back  to 
the  others,  as  with  nothing  more  to  contribute,  looked 
— though  not  less  patiently — into  the  street.  Then 
the  shopman,  for  Charlotte,  momentously  broke 
silence.  "You've  seen,  disgraziatamente,  signora 
principessa,"  he  sadly  said,  "too  much" — and  it 
made  the  Prince  face  about.  For  the  effect  of  the  mo 
mentous  came,  if  not  from  the  sense,  from  the  sound 
of  his  words;  which  was  that  of  the  suddenest  sharpest 
Italian.  Charlotte  exchanged  with  her  friend  a  glance 
that  matched  it,  and  just  for  the  minute  they  were 
held  in  check.  But  their  glance  had  after  all  by  that 
time  said  more  than  one  thing;  had  both  exclaimed 
on  the  apprehension,  by  the  wretch,  of  their  intimate 
conversation,  let  alone  of  her  possible,  her  impossible, 
title,  and  remarked,  for  mutual  reassurance,  that  it 
did  n't,  all  the  same,  matter.  The  Prince  remained 
by  the  door,  but  immediately  addressing  the  speaker 
from  where  he  stood. 

in 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"  You  're  Italian  then,  are  you  ? " 

But  the  reply  came  in  English.    "Oh  dear  no." 

"You're  English?" 

To  which  the  answer  was  this  time,  with  a  smile,  in 
briefest  Italian.  "Che!"  The  dealer  waived  the  ques 
tion  —  he  practically  disposed  of  it  by  turning 
straightway  toward  a  receptacle  to  which  he  had  n't 
yet  resorted  and  from  which,  after  unlocking  it,  he 
extracted  a  square  box,  of  some  twenty  inches  in 
height,  covered  with  worn-looking  leather.  He  placed 
the  box  on  the  counter,  pushed  back  a  pair  of  small 
hooks,  lifted  the  lid  and  removed  from  its  nest  a 
drinking- vessel  larger  than  a  common  cup,  yet  not  of 
exorbitant  size,  and  formed,  to  appearance,  either  of 
old  fine  gold  or  of  some  material  once  richly  gilt.  He 
handled  it  with  tenderness,  with  ceremony,  making 
a  place  for  it  on  a  small  satin  mat.  "My  Golden 
Bowl,"  he  observed  — and  it  sounded  on  his  lips  as  if 
it  said  everything.  He  left  the  important  object  — for 
as  "important"  it  did  somehow  present  itself — to 
produce  its  certain  effect.  Simple  but  singularly  ele 
gant,  it  stood  on  a  circular  foot,  a  short  pedestal  with 
a  slightly  spreading  base,  and,  though  not  of  signal 
depth,  justified  its  title  by  the  charm  of  its  shape  as 
well  as  by  the  tone  of  its  surface.  It  might  have  been 
a  large  goblet  diminished,  to  the  enhancement  of  its 
happy  curve,  by  half  its  original  height.  As  formed  of 
solid  gold  it  was  impressive ;  it  seemed  indeed  to  warn 
off  the  prudent  admirer.  Charlotte,  with  care,  imme 
diately  took  it  up,  while  the  Prince,  who  had  after  a 
minute  shifted  his  position  again,  regarded  it  from  a 
distance. 

112 


THE  PRINCE 

It  was  heavier  than  Charlotte  had  thought.  "Gold, 
really  gold  ? "  she  asked  of  their  companion. 

He  waited.  "Look  a  little,  and  perhaps  you'll 
make  out." 

She  looked,  holding  it  up  in  both  her  fine  hands, 
turning  it  to  the  light.  "  It  may  be  cheap  for  what  it 
is,  but  it  will  be  dear,  I  'm  afraid,  for  me." 

"Well,"  said  the  man,  "I  can  part  with  it  for  less 
than  its  value.  I  got  it,  you  see,  for  less." 

"  For  how  much  then  ? " 

Again  he  waited,  always  with  his  serene  stare.  "  Do 
you  like  it  then  ? " 

Charlotte  turned  to  her  friend.   "Do  you  like  it  ?" 

He  came  no  nearer;  he  looked  at  their  entertainer. 
"Cos'e?" 

"Well,  signori  miei,  if  you  must  know,  it's  just 
a  perfect  crystal." 

"Of  course  we  must  know,  per  Dio!"  said  the 
Prince.  But  he  turned  away  again  —  he  went  back 
to  his  glass  door. 

Charlotte  set  down  the  bowl;  she  was  evidently 
taken.  "  Do  you  mean  it 's  cut  out  of  a  single 
crystal  ?" 

"If  it  is  n't  I  think  I  can  promise  you  that  you'll 
never  find  any  joint  or  any  piecing." 

She  wondered.  "Even  if  I  were  to  scrape  off  the 
gold?" 

He  showed,  though  with  due  respect,  that  she 
amused  him.  "You  couldn't  scrape  it  off  —  it  has 
been  too  well  put  on ;  put  on  I  don't  know  when  and  I 
don't  know  how.  But  by  some  very  fine  old  worker 
and  by  some  beautiful  old  process." 

"3 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

Charlotte,  frankly  charmed  with  the  cup,  smiled 
back  at  him  now.  "A  lost  art?" 

"Call  it  a  lost  art." 

"But  of  what  time  then  is  the  whole  thing?" 

"Well,  say  also  of  a  lost  time." 

The  girl  considered.  "Then  if  it's  so  precious  how 
comes  it  to  be  cheap  ? " 

The  dealer  once  more  hung  fire,  but  by  this  time 
the  Prince  had  lost  patience.  "  I  '11  wait  for  you  out 
in  the  air,"  he  said  to  his  companion,  and  though  he 
spoke  without  irritation  he  pointed  his  remark  by 
passing  immediately  into  the  street,  where  during  the 
next  minutes  the  others  saw  him,  his  back  to  the  shop- 
window,  philosophically  enough  hover  and  light  a 
fresh  cigarette.  Charlotte  even  took  a  little  her  time ; 
she  was  aware  of  his  funny  Italian  taste  for  London 
street-life. 

Her  host  meanwhile  at  any  rate  answered  her  ques 
tion.  "Ah  I've  had  it  a  long  time  without  selling 
it.  I  think  I  must  have  been  keeping  it,  madam,  for 
you." 

"You've  kept  it  for  me  because  you've  thought  I 
might  n't  see  what 's  the  matter  with  it  ? " 

He  only  continued  to  face  her  —  he  only  continued 
to  appear  to  follow  the  play  of  her  mind.  "What  is 
the  matter  with  it  ? " 

"  Oh  it 's  not  for  me  to  say ;  it 's  for  you  honestly  to 
tell  me.  Of  course  I  know  something  must  be." 

"  But  if  it 's  something  you  can't  find  out  is  n't  that 
as  good  as  if  it  were  nothing  ? " 

"  I  probably  should  find  out  as  soon  as  I  had  paid 
for  it." 

114 


THE  PRINCE 

"Not,"  her  host  lucidly  insisted,  "if  you  hadn't 
paid  too  much." 

"What  do  you  call,"  she  asked,  "little  enough  ?" 

"  Well,  what  should  you  say  to  fifteen  pounds  ? " 

"I  should  say,"  said  Charlotte  with  the  utmost 
promptitude,  "that  it's  altogether  too  much." 

The  dealer  shook  his  head  slowly  and  sadly,  but 
firmly.  "It's  my  price,  madam  —  and  if  you  admire 
the  thing  I  think  it  really  might  be  yours.  It 's  not  too 
much.  It's  too  little.  It's  almost  nothing.  I  can't 
go  lower." 

Charlotte,  wondering  but  resisting,  bent  over  the 
bowl  again.  "Then  it 's  impossible.  It 's  more  than 
I  can  afford." 

"Ah,"  the  man  returned,  "one  can  sometimes 
afford  for  a  present  more  than  one  can  afford  for  one's 
self." 

He  said  it  so  coaxingly  that  she  found  herself  going 
on  without,  as  might  be  said,  putting  him  in  his  place. 
"Oh  of  course  it  would  be  only  for  a  present  — ! " 

"Then  it  would  be  a  lovely  one." 

"Does  one  make  a  present,"  she  asked,  "of  an 
object  that  contains  to  one's  knowledge  a  flaw  ? " 

"Well,  if  one  knows  of  it  one  has  only  to  mention 
it.  The  good  faith,"  the  man  smiled,  "is  always 
there." 

"And  leave  the  person  to  whom  one  gives  the  thing, 
you  mean,  to  discover  it  ? " 

"He  would  n't  discover  it — if  you're  speaking  of 
a  gentleman." 

"  I  'm  not  speaking  of  any  one  in  particular,"  Char 
lotte  said. 

"5 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"Well,  whoever  it  might  be.  He  might  know-* 
and  he  might  try.  But  he  would  n't  find." 

She  kept  her  eyes  on  him  as  if,  though  unsatisfied, 
mystified,  she  yet  had  a  fancy  for  the  bowl.  "  Not  even 
if  the  thing  should  come  to  pieces  ? "  And  then  as  he 
was  silent:  "Not  even  if  he  should  have  to  say  to  me 
'The  Golden  Bowl  is  broken'?" 

He  was  still  silent;  after  which  he  had  his  strang 
est  smile.  "Ah  if  any  one  should  want  to  smash 
it—!" 

She  laughed;  she  almost  admired  the  little  man's 
expression.  "You  mean  one  could  smash  it  with  a 
hammer?" 

"Yes,  if  nothing  else  would  do.  Or  perhaps  even 
by  dashing  it  with  violence  —  say  upon  a  marble 
floor." 

"Oh  marble  floors  — !"  But  she  might  have  been 
thinking  —  for  they  were  a  connexion,  marble  floors ; 
a  connexion  with  many  things :  with  her  old  Rome, 
and  with  his  ;  with  the  palaces  of  his  past  and,  a  lit 
tle,  of  hers ;  with  the  possibilities  of  his  future,  with 
the  sumptuosities  of  his  marriage,  with  the  wealth 
of  the  Ververs.  All  the  same,  however,  there  were 
other  things;  and  they  all  together  held  for  a  mo 
ment  her  fancy.  "Does  crystal  then  break — when 
it  is  crystal  ?  I  thought  its  beauty  was  its  hard 
ness." 

Her  friend,  in  his  way,  discriminated.  "Its  beauty 
is  its  being  crystal.  But  its  hardness  is  certainly  its 
safety.  It  doesn't  break,"  he  went  on,  "like  vile 
glass.  It  splits  — if  there  is  a  split." 

"  Ah ! '"'  —  Charlotte  breathed  with  interest.  "  If 
116 


THE  PRINCE 

there  is  a  split."  And  she  looked  down  again  at  the 
bowl.  "There  is  a  split,  eh  ?  Crystal  does  split,  eh  ? " 
"On  lines  and  by  laws  of  its  own." 
"  You  mean  if  there 's  a  weak  place  ? " 
For  all  answer,  after  an  hesitation,  he  took  the 
bowl  up  again,  holding  it  aloft  and  tapping  it  with  a 
key.  It  rang  with  the  finest  sweetest  sound.  "  Where 's 
the  weak  place  ? " 

She  then  did  the  question  justice.  "Well,  for  me 
only  the  price.  I  'm  poor,  you  see  —  very  poor.  But  I 
thank  you  and  I  '11  think."  The  Prince,  on  the  other 
side  of  the  shop-window,  had  finally  faced  about  and, 
as  to  see  if  she  had  n't  done,  was  trying  to  reach  with 
his  eyes  the  comparatively  dim  interior.  "I  like  it," 
she  said  —  "I  want  it.  But  I  must  decide  what  I  can 
do." 

The  man,  not  ungraciously,  resigned  himself. 
"Well,  I'll  keep  it  for  you." 

The  small  quarter  of  an  hour  had  had  its  marked 
oddity  —  this  she  felt  even  by  the  time  the  open  air 
and  the  Bloomsbury  aspects  had  again,  in  their  pro 
test  against  the  truth  of  her  gathered  impression, 
made  her  more  or  less  their  own.  Yet  the  oddity 
might  have  been  registered  as  small  as  compared  to 
the  other  effect  that,  before  they  had  gone  much 
further,  she  had  to  take  account  of  with  her  com 
panion.  This  latter  was  simply  the  effect  of  their 
having,  by  some  tacit  logic,  some  queer  inevitability, 
quite  dropped  the  idea  of  a  continued  pursuit.  They 
did  n't  say  so,  but  it  was  on  the  line  of  giving  up 
Maggie's  present  that  they  practically  proceeded  — 
the  line  of  giving  it  up  without  more  reference  to  it. 

"7 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

The  Prince's  first  reference  was  in  fact  quite  inde 
pendently  made.  "  I  hope  you  satisfied  yourself,  be 
fore  you  had  done,  of  what  was  the  matter  with  that 
bowl." 

"No  indeed,  I  satisfied  myself  of  nothing.  Of 
nothing  at  least  but  that  the  more  I  looked  at  it  the 
more  I  liked  it,  and  that  if  you  were  n't  so  unaccom 
modating  this  would  be  just  the  occasion  for  your 
giving  me  the  pleasure  of  accepting  it." 

He  looked  graver  for  her  at  this  than  he  had  looked 
all  the  morning.  "  Do  you  propose  it  seriously — with 
out  wishing  to  play  me  a  trick  ?" 

She  wondered.   "What  trick  would  it  be?" 

He  looked  at  her  harder.  "You  mean  you  really 
don't  know  ? " 

"  But  know  what  ? " 

"  Why  what 's  the  matter  with  it.  You  did  n't  see, 
all  the  while?" 

She  only  continued  however  to  stare.  "  How  could 
you  see  —  out  in  the  street  ? " 

"  I  saw  before  I  went  out.  It  was  because  I  saw  that 
I  did  go  out.  I  did  n't  want  to  have  another  scene  with 
you  before  that  rascal,  and  I  judged  you  'd  presently 
guess  for  yourself." 

"  Is  he  a  rascal  ? "  Charlotte  asked.  "  His  price  is  so 
moderate."  She  waited  but  a  moment.  "  Five  pounds. 
Really  so  little." 

He  continued  to  look  at  her.   "  Five  pounds  ? " 

"Five  pounds." 

He  might  have  been  doubting  her  word,  but  he  was 
only,  it  appeared,  gathering  emphasis.  "  It  would  be 
dear — to  make  a  gift  of  —  at  five  shillings.  If  it  had 

118 


THE  PRINCE 

cost  you  even  but  fivepence  I  would  n't  take  it  from 
you." 

"Then,"  she  asked,  "what  is  the  matter?" 

"Why  it  has  a  crack." 

It  sounded,  on  his  lips,  so  sharp,  it  had  such  an 
authority,  that  she  almost  started,  while  her  colour 
rose  at  the  word.  It  was  as  if  he  had  been  right, 
though  his  assurance  was  wonderful.  "You  answer 
for  it  without  having  looked  ? " 

"I  did  look.  I  saw  the  object  itself.  It  told  its 
story.  No  wonder  it's  cheap." 

"  But  it 's  exquisite,"  Charlotte,  as  if  with  an  in 
terest  in  it  now  made  even  tenderer  and  stranger, 
found  herself  moved  to  insist. 

"Of  course  it's  exquisite.   That's  the  danger." 

Then  a  light  visibly  came  to  her  —  a  light  in  which 
her  friend  suddenly  and  intensely  showed.  The  reflex 
ion  of  it,  as  she  smiled  at  him,  was  in  her  own  face. 
"The  danger — I  see  —  is  because  you're  super 
stitious." 

"Per  Dio  I'm  superstitious!  A  crack's  a  crack  — 
and  an  omen's  an  omen." 

"You'd  be  afraid—?" 

"Per  Bacco!" 

"For  your  happiness?" 

"For  my  happiness." 

"  For  your  safety  ? " 

"For  my  safety." 

She  just  paused.   "For  your  marriage  ?" 

"For  my  marriage.    For  everything." 

She  thought  again.  "Thank  goodness  then  that  if 
there  be  a  crack  we  know  it !  But  if  we  may  perish  by 

119 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

cracks  in  things  that  we  don't  know — !"  And  she 
smiled  with  the  sadness  of  it.  "We  can  never  then 
give  each  other  anything." 

He  considered,  but  he  met  it.  "Ah  but  one  does 
know.  /  do  at  least  — and  by  instinct.  I  don't  fail. 
That  will  always  protect  me." 

It  was  droll,  the  way  he  said  such  things;  yet  she 
liked  him  really  the  more  for  it.  They  fell  in  for  her 
with  a  general,  or  rather  with  a  special,  vision.  But 
she  spoke  with  a  mild  despair.  "What  then  will  pro 
tect  me  ?  " 

"  Where  I  'm  concerned  /  will.  From  me  at  least 
you've  nothing  to  fear,"  he  now  quite  amiably  re 
sponded.  "Anything  you  consent  to  accept  from 
me  — "  But  he  paused. 

"Well?" 

"Well,  shall  be  perfect." 

"  That 's  very  fine,"  she  presently  answered.  "  It 's 
vain,  after  all,  for  you  to  talk  of  my  accepting  things 
when  you'll  accept  nothing  from  me." 

Ah  there  better  still  he  could  meet  her.  "You 
attach  an  impossible  condition.  That,  I  mean,  of  my 
keeping  your  gift  so  to  myself." 

Well,  she  looked,  before  him  there,  at  the  condition 
—  then  abruptly,  with  a  gesture,  she  gave  it  up.  She 
had  a  headshake  of  disenchantment  — so  far  as  the 
idea  had  appealed  to  her.  It  all  appeared  too  dif 
ficult.  "Oh  my  'condition* — I  don't  hold  to  it. 
You  may  cry  it  on  the  housetops — anything  I  ever 
do." 

"Ah  well,  then — !"  This  made,  he  laughed,  all 
the  difference. 

120 


THE  PRINCE 

But  it  was  too  late.  "Oh  I  don't  care  now!  I 
should  have  liked  the  Bowl.  But  if  that  won't  do 
there's  nothing." 

He  considered  this;  he  took  it  in,  looking  graver 
again;  but  after  a  moment  he  qualified.  "Yet  I  shall 
want  some  day  to  give  you  something." 

She  wondered  at  him.   "What  day?" 

"The  day  you  marry.  For  you  will  marry.  You 
must  — seriously  — marry." 

She  took  it  from  him,  but  it  determined  in  her  the 
only  words  she  was  to  have  uttered,  all  the  morning, 
that  came  out  as  if  a  spring  had  been  pressed.  "To 
make  you  feel  better?" 

"Well,"  he  replied  frankly,  wonderfully  — "it  will. 
But  here,"  he  added,  "is  your  hansom." 

He  had  signalled — the  cab  was  charging.  She  put 
out  no  hand  for  their  separation,  but  she  prepared  to 
get  in.  Before  she  did  so,  however,  she  said  what  had 
been  gathering  while  she  waited.  "Well,  I  would 
marry,  I  think,  to  have  something  from  you  in  all 
freedom." 


BOOK  SECOND 


I 


ADAM  VERVER,  at  Fawns,  that  autumn  Sunday, 
might  have  been  observed  to  open  the  door  of  the  bil 
liard-room  with  a  certain  freedom  —  might  have  been 
observed,  that  is,  had  there  been  a  spectator  in  the 
field.  The  justification  of  the  push  he  had  applied, 
however,  and  of  the  push  equally  sharp  that,  to  shut 
himself  in,  he  again  applied — the  ground  of  this 
energy  was  precisely  that  he  might  here,  however 
briefly,  find  himself  alone,  alone  with  the  handful  of 
letters,  newspapers  and  other  unopened  missives,  to 
which,  during  and  since  breakfast,  he  had  lacked 
opportunity  to  give  an  eye.  The  vast  square  clean 
apartment  was  empty,  and  its  large  clear  windows 
looked  out  into  spaces  of  terrace  and  garden,  of  park 
and  woodland  and  shining  artificial  lake,  of  richly- 
condensed  horizon,  all  dark  blue  upland  and  church- 
towered  village  and  strong  cloud-shadow,  which  were, 
together,  a  thing  to  create  the  sense,  with  every  one 
else  at  church,  of  one's  having  the  world  to  one's 
self.  We  share  this  world,  none  the  less,  for  the  hour, 
with  Mr.  Verver;  the  very  fact  of  his  striking,  as  he 
would  have  said,  for  solitude,  the  fact  of  his  quiet 
flight,  almost  on  tiptoe,  through  tortuous  corridors, 
investing  him  with  an  interest  that  makes  our  atten 
tion — tender  indeed  almost  to  compassion  —  qualify 
his  achieved  isolation.  For  it  may  immediately  be 
mentioned  that  this  amiable  man  bethought  himself 

125 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

of  his  personal  advantage,  in  general,  only  when  it 
might  appear  to  him  that  other  advantages,  those  of 
other  persons,  had  successfully  put  in  their  claim.  It 
may  be  mentioned  also  that  he  always  figured  other 
persons  —  such  was  the  law  of  his  nature  —  as  a 
numerous  array,  and  that,  though  conscious  of  but  a 
single  near  tie,  one  affection,  one  duty  deepest-rooted 
in  his  life,  it  had  never  for  many  minutes  together 
been  his  portion  not  to  feel  himself  surrounded  and 
committed,  never  quite  been  his  refreshment  to  make 
out  where  the  many-coloured  human  appeal,  repre 
sented  by  gradations  of  tint,  diminishing  concentric 
zones  of  intensity,  of  importunity,  really  faded  to  the 
impersonal  whiteness  for  which  his  vision  sometimes 
ached.  It  shaded  off,  the  appeal — he  would  have 
admitted  that;  but  he  had  as  yet  noted  no  point  at 
which  it  positively  stopped. 

Thus  had  grown  in  him  a  little  habit  —  his  inner 
most  secret,  not  confided  even  to  Maggie,  though  he 
felt  she  understood  it,  as  she  understood,  to  his  view, 
everything — thus  had  shaped  itself  the  innocent 
trick  of  occasionally  making-believe  that  he  had  no 
conscience,  or  at  least  that  blankness,  in  the  field  of 
duty,  did  reign  for  an  hour;  a  small  game  to  which  the 
few  persons  near  enough  to  have  caught  him  playing  it, 
and  of  whom  Mrs.  Assingham,  for  instance,  was  one, 
attached  indulgently  that  idea  of  quaintness,  quite 
in  fact  that  charm  of  the  pathetic,  involved  in  the 
preservation  by  an  adult  of  one  of  childhood's  toys. 
When  he  took  a  rare  moment  "off"  he  did  so  with  the 
touching,  confessing  eyes  of  a  man  of  forty-seven 
caught  in  the  act  of  handling  a  relic  of  infancy  — 

126 


THE  PRINCE 

sticking  on  the  head  of  a  broken  soldier  or  trying  the 
lock  of  a  wooden  gun.  It  was  essentially  in  him  the 
imitation  of  depravity — which  for  amusement,  as 
might  have  been,  he  practised  "  keeping  up."  In  spite 
of  practice  he  was  still  imperfect,  for  these  so  art 
lessly-artful  interludes  were  condemned,  by  the  nat 
ure  of  the  case,  to  brevity.  He  had  fatally  stamped 
himself —  it  was  his  own  fault — a  man  who  could  be 
interrupted  with  impunity.  The  greatest  of  wonders 
moreover  was  exactly  in  this,  that  so  interrupted  a 
man  should  ever  have  got,  as  the  phrase  was,  should 
above  all  have  got  so  early,  to  where  he  was.  It  argued 
a  special  genius;  he  was  clearly  a  case  of  that.  The 
spark  of  fire,  the  point  of  light,  sat  somewhere  in  his 
inward  vagueness  as  a  lamp  before  a  shrine  twinkles  in 
the  dark  perspective  of  a  church ;  and  while  youth  and 
early  middle-age,  while  the  stiff  American  breeze  of 
example  and  opportunity  were  blowing  upon  it  hard, 
had  made  of  the  chamber  of  his  brain  a  strange  work 
shop  of  fortune.  This  establishment,  mysterious  and 
almost  anonymous,  the  windows  of  which,  at  hours 
of  highest  pressure,  never  seemed,  for  starers  and 
wonderers,  perceptibly  to  glow,  must  in  fact  have 
been  during  certain  years  the  scene  of  an  unprece 
dented,  a  miraculous  white-heat,  the  receipt  for  pro 
ducing  which  it  was  practically  felt  that  the  master  of 
the  forge  could  n't  have  communicated  even  with  the 
best  intentions. 

The  essential  pulse  of  the  flame,  the  very  action  of 
the  cerebral  temperature,  brought  to  the  highest  point, 
yet  extraordinarily  contained  —  these  facts  themselves 
were  the  immensity  of  the  result;  they  were  one  with 

127 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

perfection  of  machinery,  they  had  constituted  the  kind 
of  acquisitive  power  engendered  and  applied,  the  nec 
essary  triumph  of  all  operations.  A  dim  explanation 
of  phenomena  once  vivid  must  at  all  events  for  the 
moment  suffice  us;  it  being  obviously  no  account  of 
the  matter  to  throw  on  our  friend's  amiability  alone 
the  weight  of  the  demonstration  of  his  economic  his 
tory.  Amiability,  of  a  truth,  is  an  aid  to  success;  it  has 
even  been  known  to  be  the  principle  of  large  accumu 
lations;  but  the  link,  for  the  mind,  is  none  the  less 
fatally  missing  between  proof,  on  such  a  scale,  of 
continuity,  if  of  nothing  more  insolent,  in  one  field, 
and  accessibility  to  distraction  in  every  other.  Variety 
of  imagination  —  what  is  that  but  fatal  in  the  world 
of  affairs  unless  so  disciplined  as  not  to  be  distin 
guished  from  monotony  ?  Mr.  Verver  then,  for  a 
fresh  full  period,  a  period  betraying,  extraordinarily, 
no  wasted  year,  had  been  inscrutably  monotonous 
behind  an  iridescent  cloud.  The  cloud  was  his  native 
envelope — the  soft  looseness,  so  to  say,  of  his  temper 
and  tone,  not  directly  expressive  enough,  no  doubt,  to 
figure  an  amplitude  of  folds,  but  of  a  quality  unmis- 
takeable  for  sensitive  feelers.  He  was  still  reduced  in 
fine  to  getting  his  rare  moments  with  himself  by  feign 
ing  a  cynicism.  His  real  inability  to  maintain  the  pre 
tence,  however,  had  perhaps  not  often  been  better 
instanced  than  by  his  acceptance  of  the  inevitable 
to-day  —  his  acceptance  of  it  on  the  arrival,  at  the 
end  of  a  quarter  of  an  hour,  of  that  element  of  obliga 
tion  with  which  he  had  all  the  while  known  he  must 
reckon.  A  quarter  of  an  hour  of  egoism  was  about 
as  much  as  he,  taking  one  situation  with  another, 

128 


THE  PRINCE 

usually  got.  Mrs.  Ranee  opened  the  door  —  more 
tentatively  indeed  than  he  himself  had  just  done ;  but 
on  the  other  hand,  as  if  to  make  up  for  this,  she  pushed 
forward  even  more  briskly  on  seeing  him  than  he  had 
been  moved  to  do  on  seeing  nobody.  Then  with  force 
it  came  home  to  him  that  he  had  a  week  before  defin 
itely  established  a  precedent.  He  did  her  at  least 
that  justice  —  it  was  a  kind  of  justice  he  was  always 
doing  somebody.  He  had  on  the  previous  Sunday 
liked  to  stop  at  home  and  had  exposed  himself 
thereby  to  be  caught  in  the  act.  To  make  this  possible, 
that  is,  Mrs.  Ranee  had  only  had  to  like  to  do  the 
same  —  the  trick  was  so  easily  played.  It  had  n't 
occurred  *o  him  to  plan  in  any  way  for  her  absence  — 
which  would  have  destroyed  somehow  in  principle  the 
propriety  of  his  own  presence.  If  persons  under  his 
roof  had  n't  a  right  not  to  go  to  church  what  became, 
for  a  fair  mind,  of  his  own  right  ?  His  subtlest  man 
oeuvre  had  been  simply  to  change  from  the  library 
to  the  billiard-room,  it  being  in  the  library  that  his 
guest,  or  his  daughter's,  or  the  guest  of  the  Miss 
Lutches  —  he  scarce  knew  in  which  light  to  regard 
her  —  had  then,  and  not  unnaturally  of  course, 
joined  him.  It  was  urged  on  him  by  his  memory  of  the 
duration  of  the  visit  she  had  that  time,  as  it  were,  paid 
him,  that  the  law  of  recurrence  would  already  have 
got  itself  enacted.  She  had  spent  the  whole  morn 
ing  with  him,  was  still  there,  in  the  library,  when  the 
others  came  back  —  thanks  to  her  having  been  tepid 
about  their  taking,  Mr.  Verver  and  she,  a  turn  outside. 
It  had  been  as  if  she  looked  on  that  as  a  kind  of  sub 
terfuge  —  almost  as  a  form  of  disloyalty.  Yet  what 

129 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

was  it  she  had  in  mind,  what  did  she  wish  to  make  of 
him  beyond  what  she  had  already  made,  a  patient 
punctilious  host,  mindful  that  she  had  originally  ar 
rived  much  as  a  stranger,  arrived  not  at  all  deliber 
ately  or  yearningly  invited  ?  —  so  that  one  positively 
had  her  possible  susceptibilities  the  more  on  one's 
conscience.  The  Miss  Lutches,  the  sisters  from  the 
Middle  West,  were  there  as  friends  of  Maggie's, 
friends  of  the  earlier  time;  but  Mrs.  Ranee  was  there 
— or  at  least  had  primarily  appeared  —  only  as  a 
friend  of  the  Miss  Lutches. 

This  lady  herself  was  not  of  the  Middle  West  —  she 
rather  insisted  on  it — but  of  New  Jersey,  Rhode 
Island  or  Delaware,  one  of  the  smallest  and  most  inti 
mate  States :  he  could  n't  remember  which,  though 
she  insisted  too  on  that.  It  was  n't  in  him — we  may 
say  it  for  him — to  go  so  far  as  to  wonder  if  their 
group  were  next  to  be  recruited  by  some  friend  of  her 
own;  and  this  partly  because  she  had  struck  him 
verily  rather  as  wanting  to  get  the  Miss  Lutches  them 
selves  away  than  to  extend  the  actual  circle,  and 
partly,  as  well  as  more  essentially,  because  such  con 
nexion  as  he  enjoyed  with  the  ironic  question  in  gen 
eral  resided  substantially  less  in  a  personal  use  of  it 
than  in  the  habit  of  seeing  it  as  easy  to  others.  He 
was  so  framed  by  nature  as  to  be  able  to  keep  his 
inconveniences  separate  from  his  resentments ;  though 
indeed  if  the  sum  of  these  latter  had  at  the  most  al 
ways  been  small,  that  was  doubtless  in  some  degree 
a  consequence  of  the  fewness  of  the  former.  His 
greatest  inconvenience,  he  would  have  admitted  had 
he  analysed,  was  in  rinding  it  so  taken  for  granted 

130 


THE  PRINCE 

that  as  he  had  money  he  had  force.  It  pressed  upon 
him  hard  and  all  round  assuredly,  this  attribution  of 
power.  Every  one  had  need  of  one's  power,  whereas 
one's  own  need,  at  the  best,  would  have  seemed  to  be 
but  some  trick  for  not  communicating  it.  The  effect 
of  a  reserve  so  merely,  so  meanly  defensive  would  in 
most  cases,  beyond  question,  sufficiently  discredit  the 
cause;  wherefore,  though  it  was  complicating  to  be 
perpetually  treated  as  an  infinite  agent,  the  outrage 
was  not  the  greatest  of  which  a  brave  man  might  com 
plain.  Complaint,  besides,  was  a  luxury,  and  he 
dreaded  the  imputation  of  greed.  The  other,  the  con 
stant  imputation,  that  of  being  able  to  "do,"  would 
have  no  ground  if  he  had  n't  been,  to  start  with  — 
this  was  the  point  —  proveably  luxurious.  His  lips 
somehow  were  closed — and  by  a  spring  connected 
moreover  with  the  action  of  his  eyes  themselves.  The 
latter  showed  him  what  he  had  done,  showed  him 
where  he  had  come  out;  quite  at  the  top  of  his  hill  of 
difficulty,  the  tall  sharp  spiral  round  which  he  had 
begun  to  wind  his  ascent  at  the  age  of  twenty,  and 
the  apex  of  which  was  a  platform  looking  down,  if  one 
would,  on  the  kingdoms  of  the  earth  and  with  stand 
ing-room  for  but  half  a  dozen  others. 

His  eyes,  in  any  case,  now  saw  Mrs.  Ranee  ap 
proach  with  an  instant  failure  to  attach  to  the  fact 
any  grossness  of  avidity  of  Mrs.  Ranee's  own — or  at 
least  to  descry  any  triumphant  use  even  for  the  lurid- 
est  impression  of  her  intensity.  What  was  virtually 
supreme  would  be  her  vision  of  his  having  attempted, 
by  his  desertion  of  the  library,  to  mislead  her  — 
which  in  point  of  fact  barely  escaped  being  what  he 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

had  designed.  It  was  n't  easy  for  him,  in  spite  of  ac 
cumulations  fondly  and  funnily  regarded  as  of  sys 
tematic  practice,  not  now  to  be  ashamed;  the  one 
thing  comparatively  easy  would  be  to  gloss  over  his 
course.  The  billiard-room  was  not,  at  the  particular 
crisis,  either  a  natural  or  a  graceful  place  for  the  nom 
inally  main  occupant  of  so  large  a  house  to  retire  to  — • 
and  this  without  prejudice,  either,  to  the  fact  that  his 
visitor  would  n't,  as  he  apprehended,  explicitly  make 
him  a  scene.  Should  she  frankly  denounce  him  for  a 
sneak  he  would  simply  go  to  pieces ;  but  he  was  after 
an  instant  not  afraid  of  that.  Would  n't  she  rather, 
as  emphasising  their  communion,  accept  and  in  a 
manner  exploit  the  anomaly,  treat  it  perhaps  as  ro 
mantic  or  possibly  even  as  comic  ?  — show  at  least  that 
they  need  n't  mind  even  though  the  vast  table,  draped 
in  brown  holland,  thrust  itself  between  them  as  an 
expanse  of  desert  sand.  She  could  n't  cross  the  desert, 
but  she  could,  and  did,  beautifully  get  round  it;  so 
that  for  him  to  change  it  into  an  obstacle  he  would 
have  had  to  cause  himself,  as  in  some  childish  game 
or  unbecoming  romp,  to  be  pursued,  to  be  genially 
hunted.  This  last  was  a  turn  he  was  well  aware  the 
occasion  should  on  no  account  take;  and  there 
loomed  before  him  —  for  the  mere  moment — the 
prospect  of  her  fairly  proposing  that  they  should 
knock  about  the  balls.  That  danger  certainly,  it 
struck  him,  he  should  manage  in  some  way  to  deal 
with.  Why  too  for  that  matter  had  he  need  of  de 
fences,  material  or  other  ?  —  how  was  it  a  question  of 
dangers  really  to  be  called  such  ?  The  deep  danger, 
the  only  one  that  made  him,  as  an  idea,  positively 

132 


THE   PRINCE 

turn  cold,  would  have  been  the  possibility  of  her  seek 
ing  him  in  marriage,  of  her  bringing  up  between 
them  that  terrible  issue.  Here  fortunately  she  was 
powerless,  it  being  apparently  so  proveable  against  her 
that  she  had  a  husband  in  undiminished  existence. 
She  had  him,  it  was  true,  only  in  America,  only  in 
Texas,  in  Nebraska,  in  Arizona  or  somewhere  — • 
somewhere  that,  at  old  Fawns  House  in  the  county  of 
Kent,  scarcely  figured  as  a  definite  place  at  all;  it 
showed  somehow  from  afar  as  so  lost,  so  indistinct 
and  illusory,  in  the  great  alkali  desert  of  cheap  Di 
vorce.  She  had  him  even  in  bondage,  poor  man,  had 
him  in  contempt,  had  him  in  remembrance  so  imper 
fect  as  barely  to  assert  itself,  but  she  had  him,  none 
the  less,  in  existence  unimpeached :  the  Miss  Lutches 
had  seen  him  in  the  flesh  —  as  they  had  appeared 
eager  to  mention ;  though  when  they  were  separately 
questioned  their  descriptions  failed  to  tally.  He 
would  be  at  the  worst,  should  it  come  to  the  worst, 
Mrs.  Ranee's  difficulty,  and  he  served  therefore  quite 
enough  as  the  stout  bulwark  of  any  one  else.  This 
was  in  truth  logic  without  a  flaw,  yet  it  gave  Mr. 
Verver  less  comfort  than  it  ought.  He  feared  not  only 
danger  —  he  feared  the  idea  of  danger,  or  in  other 
words  feared,  hauntedly,  himself.  It  was  above  all  as 
a  symbol  that  Mrs.  Ranee  actually  rose  before  him 
—  a  symbol  of  the  supreme  effort  that  he  should  have 
sooner  or  later,  as  he  felt,  to  make.  This  effort  would 
be  to  say  No  —  he  lived  in  terror  of  having  to.  He 
should  be  proposed  to  at  a  given  moment  —  it  was 
only  a  question  of  time  —  and  then  he  should  have  to 
do  a  thing  that  would  be  extremely  disagreeable.  He 

133 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

almost  wished  on  occasion  that  he  was  n't  so  sure  he 
would  do  it.  He  knew  himself,  however,  well  enough 
not  to  doubt :  he  knew  coldly,  quite  bleakly,  where  he 
would,  at  the  crisis,  draw  the  line.  It  was  Maggie's 
marriage  and  Maggie's  finer  happiness  —  happy  as 
he  had  supposed  her  before  —  that  had  made  the 
difference ;  he  had  n't  in  the  other  time,  it  now  seemed 
to  him,  had  to  think  of  such  things.  They  had  n't 
come  up  for  him,  and  it  was  positively  as  if  she  had 
herself  kept  them  down.  She  had  only  been  his  child 
—  which  she  was  indeed  as  much  as  ever;  but  there 
were  sides  on  which  she  had  protected  him  as  if  she 
were  more  than  a  daughter.  She  had  done  for  him 
more  than  he  knew — much,  and  blissfully,  as  he 
always  had  known.  If  she  did  at  present  more  than 
ever,  through  having  what  she  called  the  change  in 
his  life  to  make  up  to  him  for,  his  situation  still,  all  the 
same,  kept  pace  with  her  activity — his  situation  be 
ing  simply  that  there  was  more  than  ever  to  be  done. 
There  had  n't  yet  been  quite  so  much,  on  all  the 
showing,  as  since  their  return  from  their  twenty 
months  in  America,  as  since  their  settlement  again  in 
England,  experimental  though  it  was,  and  the  conse 
quent  sense,  now  quite  established  for  him,  of  a  do 
mestic  air  that  had  cleared  and  lightened,  producing 
the  effect,  for  their  common  personal  life,  of  wider  per 
spectives  and  large  waiting  spaces.  It  was  as  if  his 
son-in-law's  presence,  even  from  before  his  becoming 
his  son-in-law,  had  somehow  filled  the  scene  and 
blocked  the  future  —  very  richly  and  handsomely, 
when  all  was  said,  not  at  all  inconveniently  or  in  ways 
not  to  have  been  desired :  inasmuch  as  though  the 

134 


THE  PRINCE 

Prince,  his  measure  now  practically  taken,  was  still 
pretty  much  the  same  "  big  fact,"  the  sky  had  lifted, 
the  horizon  receded,  the  very  foreground  itself  ex 
panded,  quite  to  match  him,  quite  to  keep  everything 
in  comfortable  scale.  At  first,  certainly,  their  decent 
little  old-time  union,  Maggie's  and  his  own,  had  re 
sembled  a  good  deal  some  pleasant  public  square,  in 
the  heart  of  an  old  city,  into  which  a  great  Palladian 
church,  say  —  something  with  a  grand  architectural 
front — had  suddenly  been  dropped;  so  that  the  rest 
of  the  place,  the  space  in  front,  the  way  round,  outside, 
to  the  east  end,  the  margin  of  street  and  passage,  the 
quantity  of  overarching  heaven,  had  been  temporar 
ily  compromised.  Not  even  then,  of  a  truth,  in  a 
manner  disconcerting — given,  that  is,  for  the  critical, 
or  at  least  the  intelligent  eye,  the  great  style  of  the 
facade  and  its  high  place  in  its  class.  The  phenom 
enon  that  had  since  occurred,  whether  originally  to 
have  been  pronounced  calculable  or  not,  had  n't, 
naturally,  been  the  miracle  of  a  night,  but  had  taken 
place  so  gradually,  quietly,  easily,  that  from  this 
vantage  of  wide  wooded  Fawns,  with  its  eighty  rooms, 
as  they  said,  with  its  spreading  park,  with  its  acres 
and  acres  of  garden  and  its  majesty  of  artificial  lake 
— though  that,  for  a  person  so  familiar  with  the 
*' great"  ones,  might  be  rather  ridiculous — no  vis 
ibility  of  transition  showed,  no  violence  of  accom 
modation,  in  retrospect,  emerged.  The  Palladian 
church  was  always  there,  but  the  piazza  took  care  of 
itself.  The  sun  stared  down  in  his  fulness,  the  air  cir 
culated,  and  the  public  not  less ;  the  limit  stood  ofF,  the 
way  round  was  easy,  the  east  end  was  as  fine,  in  its 

135 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

fashion,  as  the  west,  and  there  were  also  side  doors 
of  entrance  between  the  two — large,  monumental, 
ornamental,  in  their  style  —  as  for  all  proper  great 
churches.  By  some  such  process  in  fine  had  the 
Prince,  for  his  father-in-law,  while  remaining  solidly 
a  feature,  ceased  to  be  at  all  ominously  a  block. 

Mr.  Verver,  it  may  further  be  mentioned,  had  taken 
at  no  moment  sufficient  alarm  to  have  kept  in  detail 
the  record  of  his  reassurance ;  but  he  would  none  the 
less  not  have  been  unable,  not  really  have  been  indis 
posed,  to  impart  in  confidence  to  the  right  person  his 
notion  of  the  history  of  the  matter.  The  right  person 
— it  is  equally  distinct  —  had  not,  for  this  illumina 
tion,  been  wanting,  but  had  been  encountered  in  the 
form  of  Fanny  Assingham,  not  for  the  first  time  in 
deed  admitted  to  his  counsels,  and  who  would  have 
doubtless  at  present,  in  any  case,  from  plenitude  of 
interest  and  with  equal  guarantees,  repeated  his  se 
cret.  It  all  came  then,  the  great  clearance,  from  the 
one  prime  fact  that  the  Prince,  by  good  fortune, 
had  n't  proved  angular.  He  clung  to  that  description 
of  his  daughter's  husband  as  he  often  did  to  terms  and 
phrases,  in  the  human,  the  social  connexion,  that  he 
had  found  for  himself:  it  was  his  way  to  have  times  of 
using  these  constantly,  as  if  they  just  then  lighted  the 
world,  or  his  own  path  in  it,  for  him  —  even  when 
for  some  of  his  interlocutors  they  covered  less  ground. 
It  was  true  that  with  Mrs.  Assingham  he  never  felt 
quite  sure  of  the  ground  anything  covered ;  she  dis 
puted  with  him  so  little,  agreed  with  him  so  much, 
surrounded  him  with  such  systematic  consideration, 
such  predetermined  tenderness,  that  it  was  almost  — 

136 


THE   PRINCE 

which  he  had  once  told  her  in  irritation  —  as  if  she 
were  nursing  a  sick  baby.  He  had  accused  her  of  not 
taking  him  seriously,  and  she  had  replied  —  as  from 
her  it  could  n't  frighten  him  —  that  she  took  him 
religiously,  adoringly.  She  had  laughed  again,  as  she 
had  laughed  before,  on  his  producing  for  her  that 
good  right  word  about  the  happy  issue  of  his  connex 
ion  with  the  Prince  —  with  an  effect  the  more  odd 
perhaps  as  she  had  n't  contested  its  value.  She 
could  n't  of  course  however  be  at  the  best  as  much  in 
love  with  his  discovery  as  he  was  himself.  He  was  so 
much  so  that  he  fairly  worked  it  —  to  his  own  com 
fort;  came  in  fact  sometimes  near  publicly  pointing 
the  moral  of  what  might  have  occurred  if  friction,  so 
to  speak,  had  occurred.  He  pointed  it  frankly  one 
day  to  the  personage  in  question,  mentioned  to  the 
Prince  the  particular  justice  he  did  him,  was  even 
explicit  as  to  the  danger  that  in  their  remarkable 
relation  they  had  thus  escaped.  Oh  if  he  had  been 
angular!  — who  could  say  what  might  then  have 
happened  ?  He  spoke  —  and  it  was  the  way  he  had 
spoken  to  Mrs.  Assingham  too  —  as  if  he  grasped  the 
facts,  without  exception,  for  which  angularity  stood. 
It  figured  for  him  clearly  as  a  final  idea,  a  concep 
tion  of  the  last  vividness.  He  might  have  been  signi 
fying  by  it  the  sharp  corners  and  hard  edges,  all  the 
stony  pointedness,  the  grand  right  geometry  of  his 
spreading  Palladian  church.  Just  so  he  was  insens 
ible  to  no  feature  of  the  felicity  of  a  contact  that, 
heguilingly,  almost  confoundingly,  was  a  contact  but 
with  practically  yielding  lines  and  curved  surfaces. 
"You 're  round,  my  boy,"  he  had  said  —  "you  're  all, 

137 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

you're  variously  and  inexhaustibly  round,  when  you 
might,  by  all  the  chances,  have  been  abominably 
square.  I  'm  not  sure,  for  that  matter,"  he  had  added, 
"that  you're  not  square  in  the  general  mass  — 
whether  abominably  or  not.  The  abomination  is  n't 
a  question,  for  you  're  inveterately  round  —  that 's 
what  I  mean  —  in  the  detail.  It 's  the  sort  of  thing  in 
you  that  one  feels  —  or  at  least  I  do  —  with  one's 
hand.  Say  you  had  been  formed  all  over  in  a  lot  of 
little  pyramidal  lozenges  like  that  wonderful  side  of 
the  Ducal  Palace  in  Venice  —  so  lovely  in  a  building, 
but  so  damnable,  for  rubbing  against,  in  a  man,  and 
especially  in  a  near  relation.  I  can  see  them  all  from 
here  —  each  of  them  sticking  out  by  itself —  all  the 
architectural  cut  diamonds  that  would  have  scratched 
one's  softer  sides.  One  would  have  been  scratched  by 
diamonds  —  doubtless  the  neatest  way  if  one  was  to 
be  scratched  at  all  —  but  one  would  have  been  more 
or  less  reduced  to  a  hash.  As  it  is,  for  living  with, 
you  're  a  pure  and  perfect  crystal.  I  give  you  my  idea 
—  I  think  you  ought  to  have  it —  just  as  it  has  come 
to  me."  The  Prince  had  taken  the  idea,  in  his  way, 
for  he  was  well  accustomed  by  this  time  to  taking; 
and  nothing  perhaps  even  could  more  have  confirmed 
Mr.  Verver's  account  of  his  surface  than  the  manner 
in  which  these  golden  drops  evenly  flowed  over  it. 
They  caught  in  no  interstice,  they  gathered  in  no  con 
cavity  ;  the  uniform  smoothness  betrayed  the  dew  but 
by  showing  for  the  moment  a  richer  tone.  The  young 
man,  in  other  words,  unconfusedly  smiled  —  though 
indeed  as  if  assenting,  from  principle  and  habit,  to 
more  than  he  understood.  He  liked  all  signs  that 

138 


THE  PRINCE 

things  were  well,  but  he  cared  rather  less  why  they 
were. 

In  regard  to  the  people  among  whom  he  had  since 
his  marriage  been  living,  the  reasons  they  so  frequently 
gave —  so  much  oftener  than  he  had  ever  heard  rea 
sons  given  before — remained  on  the  whole  the  ele 
ment  by  which  he  most  differed  from  them;  and  his 
father-in-law  and  his  wife  were  after  all  only  first 
among  the  people  among  whom  he  had  been  living. 
He  was  never  even  yet  sure  of  how,  at  this,  that  or  the 
other  point,  he  would  strike  them;  they  felt  remark 
ably,  so  often,  things  he  had  n't  meant,  and  missed 
not  less  remarkably,  and  not  less  often,  things  he  had. 
He  had  fallen  back  on  his  general  explanation  — 
"  We  have  n't  the  same  values  " ;  by  which  he  under 
stood  the  same  measure  of  importance.  His  "curves  " 
apparently  were  important  because  they  had  been 
unexpected,  or,  still  more,  unconceived;  whereas 
when  one  had  always,  as  in  his  relegated  old  world, 
taken  curves,  and  in  much  greater  quantities  too,  for 
granted,  one  was  no  more  surprised  at  the  resulting 
feasibility  of  intercourse  than  one  was  surprised  at 
being  upstairs  in  a  house  that  had  a  staircase.  He 
had  in  fact  on  this  occasion  disposed  alertly  enough 
of  the  subject  of  Mr.  Verver's  approbation.  The 
promptitude  of  his  answer,  we  may  in  fact  well  sur 
mise,  had  sprung  not  a  little  from  a  particular  kindled 
remembrance;  this  had  given  his  acknowledgement 
its  easiest  turn.  "Oh  if  I  'm  a  crystal  I  'm  delighted 
that  I  'm  a  perfect  one,  for  I  believe  they  some 
times  have  cracks  and  flaws  —  in  which  case  they  're 
to  be  had  very  cheap ! "  He  had  stopped  short  of  the 

139 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

emphasis  it  would  have  given  his  joke  to  add  that 
there  had  been  certainly  no  having  him  cheap;  and 
it  was  doubtless  a  mark  of  the  good  taste  practically 
reigning  between  them  that  Mr.  Verver  had  n't  on 
his  side  either  taken  up  the  opportunity.  It  is  the  lat- 
ter's  relation  to  such  aspects,  however,  that  now  most 
concerns  us,  and  the  bearing  of  his  pleased  view  of 
this  absence  of  friction  upon  Amerigo's  character  as 
a  representative  precious  object.  Representative  pre 
cious  objects,  great  ancient  pictures  and  other  works 
of  art,  fine  eminent  "pieces"  in  gold,  in  silver,  in 
enamel,  majolica,  ivory,  bronze,  had  for  a  number  of 
years  so  multiplied  themselves  round  him  and,  as  a 
general  challenge  to  acquisition  and  appreciation,  so 
engaged  all  the  faculties  of  his  mind,  that  the  instinct, 
the  particular  sharpened  appetite  of  the  collector,  had 
fairly  served  as  a  basis  for  his  acceptance  of  the 
Prince's  suit. 

Over  and  above  the  signal  fact  of  the  impression 
made  on  Maggie  herself,  the  aspirant  to  his  daughter's 
hand  showed  somehow  the  great  marks  and  signs, 
stood  before  him  with  the  high  authenticities,  he  had 
learnt  to  look  for  in  pieces  of  the  first  order.  Adam 
Verver  knew  by  this  time,  knew  thoroughly ;  no  man 
in  Europe  or  in  America,  he  privately  believed,  was1 
for  such  estimates  less  capable  of  vulgar  mistakes 
He  had  never  spoken  of  himself  as  infallible — il 
was  n't  his  way;  but  apart  from  the  natural  affections 
he  had  acquainted  himself  with  no  greater  joy  of  the 
intimately  personal  type  than  the  joy  of  his  originally 
coming  to  feel,  and  all  so  unexpectedly,  that  he  had  in 
him  the  spirit  of  the  connoisseur.  He  had,  like  many 

140 


THE  PRINCE 

other  persons,  in  the  course  of  his  reading,  been  struck 
with  Keats's  sonnet  about  stout  Cortez  in  the  presence 
of  the  Pacific;  but  it  was  probable  that  few  persons 
had  so  devoutly  fitted  the  poet's  grand  image  to  a  fact 
of  experience.  It  consorted  so  with  Mr.  Verver's  con 
sciousness  of  the  way  in  which  at  a  given  moment  he 
had  stared  at  bis  Pacific  that  a  couple  of  perusals  of 
the  immortal  lines  had  sufficed  to  stamp  them  in  his 
memory.  His  "  peak  in  Darien  "  was  the  sudden  hour 
that  had  transformed  his  life,  the  hour  of  his  perceiv 
ing  with  a  mute  inward  gasp  akin  to  the  low  moan  of 
apprehensive  passion  that  a  world  was  left  him  to  con 
quer  and  that  he  might  conquer  it  if  he  tried.  It  had 
been  a  turning  of  the  page  of  the  book  of  life  — as  if  a 
leaf  long  inert  had  moved  at  a  touch  and,  eagerly  re 
versed,  had  made  such  a  stir  of  the  air  as  sent  up  into 
his  face  the  very  breath  of  the  Golden  Isles.  To  rifle 
the  Golden  Isles  had  become  on  the  spot  the  business 
of  his  future,  and  with  the  sweetness  of  it — what  was 
most  wondrous  of  all  —  still  more  even  in  the  thought 
than  in  the  act.  The  thought  was  that  of  the  affinity 
of  Genius,  or  at  least  of  Taste,  with  something  in  him 
self — with  the  dormant  intelligence  of  which  he  had 
thus  almost  violently  become  aware  and  that  affected 
him  as  changing  by  a  mere  revolution  of  the  screw  his 
whole  intellectual  plane.  He  was  equal  somehow 
with  the  great  seers,  the  invokers  and  encouragersof 
beauty  —  and  he  did  n't  after  all  perhaps  dangle  so 
far  below  the  great  producers  and  creators.  He  had 
been  nothing  of  that  kind  before  —  too  decidedly,  too 
dreadfully  not;  but  now  he  saw  why  he  had  been  what 
he  had,  why  he  had  failed  and  fallen  short  even  in 

141 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

huge  success ;  now  he  read  into  his  career,  in  one  single 
magnificent  night,  the  immense  meaning  it  had  waited 
for. 

It  was  during  his  first  visit  to  Europe  after  the  death 
of  his  wife,  when  his  daughter  was  ten  years  old,  that 
the  light,  in  his  mind,  had  so  broken  —  and  he  had 
even  made  out  at  that  time  why  on  an  earlier  occasion, 
the  journey  of  his  honeymoon  year,  it  had  still  been 
closely  covered.  He  had  "bought"  then,  so  far  as  he 
had  been  able,  but  he  had  bought  almost  wholly  for 
the  frail  fluttered  creature  at  his  side,  who  had  had 
her  fancies,  decidedly,  but  all  for  the  art,  then  wonder 
ful  to  both  of  them,  of  the  Rue  de  la  Paix,  the  costly 
authenticities  of  dressmakers  and  jewellers.  Her 
flutter  —  pale  disconcerted  ghost  as  she  actually  was, 
a  broken  white  flower  tied  round,  almost  grotesquely 
for  his  present  sense,  with  a  huge  satin  "  bow  "  of  the 
Boulevard  —  her  flutter  had  been  mainly  that  of 
ribbons,  frills  and  fine  fabrics;  all  funny  pathetic 
evidence,  for  memory,  of  the  bewilderments  over 
taking  them  as  a  bridal  pair  confronted  with  oppor 
tunity.  He  could  wince  fairly  still  as  he  remembered 
the  sense  in  which  the  poor  girl's  pressure  had,  under 
his  fond  encouragement  indeed,  been  exerted  in  fa 
vour  of  purchase  and  curiosity.  These  were  wander 
ing  images,  out  of  the  earlier  dusk,  that  threw  her 
back  for  his  pity  into  a  past  more  remote  than  he 
liked  their  common  past,  their  young  affection,  to 
appear.  It  would  have  had  to  be  admitted,  to  an 
insistent  criticism,  that  Maggie's  mother,  all  too 
strangely,  had  n't  so  much  failed  of  faith  as  of  the 
right  application  of  it;  since  she  had  exercised  it 

142 


THE   PRINCE 

eagerly  and  restlessly,  made  it  a  pretext  for  innocent 
perversities  in  respect  to  which  philosophic  time  was 
at  last  to  reduce  all  groans  to  gentleness.  And  they 
had  loved  each  other  so  that  his  own  intelligence,  on 
the  higher  line,  had  temporarily  paid  for  it.  The 
futilities,  the  enormities,  the  depravities  of  decoration 
and  ingenuity  that  before  his  sense  was  unsealed  she 
had  made  him  think  lovely!  Musing,  reconsidering 
little  man  that  he  was,  and  addicted  to  silent  pleasures 
—  as  he  was  accessible  to  silent  pains  —  he  even 
sometimes  wondered  what  would  have  become  of  his 
intelligence,  in  the  sphere  in  which  it  was  to  learn 
more  and  more  exclusively  to  play,  if  his  wife's  in 
fluence  on  it  had  n't  been,  in  the  strange  scheme  of 
things,  so  promptly  removed.  Would  she  have  led 
him  altogether,  attached  as  he  was  to  her,  into  the 
wilderness  of  mere  mistakes  ?  Would  she  have  pre 
vented  him  from  ever  scaling  his  vertiginous  Peak  ?  — 
or  would  she  otherwise  have  been  able  to  accompany 
him  to  that  eminence,  where  he  might  have  pointed 
out  to  her,  as  Cortez  to  his  companions,  the  revelation 
vouchsafed  ?  No  companion  of  Cortez  had  presum 
ably  been  a  real  lady :  Mr.  Verver  allowed  that  his 
toric  fact  to  determine  his  inference. 


II 


WHAT  was  at  all  events  not  permanently  hidden 
from  him  was  a  truth  much  less  invidious  about  his 
years  of  darkness.  It  was  the  strange  scheme  of 
things  again :  the  years  of  darkness  had  been  needed 
to  render  possible  the  years  of  light.  A  wiser  hand 
than  he  at  first  knew  had  kept  him  hard  at  acquisi 
tion  of  one  sort  as  a  perfect  preliminary  to  acquisition 
of  another,  and  the  preliminary  would  have  been  weak 
and  wanting  if  the  good  faith  of  it  had  been  less.  His 
comparative  blindness  had  made  the  good  faith,  which 
in  its  turn  had  made  the  soil  propitious  for  the  flower 
of  the  supreme  idea.  He  had  had  to  like  forging 
and  sweating,  he  had  had  to  like  polishing  and  piling 
up  his  arms.  They  were  things  at  least  he  had  had  to 
believe  he  liked,  just  as  he  had  believed  he  liked  tran 
scendent  calculation  and  imaginative  gambling  all  for 
themselves,  the  creation  of  "interests"  that  were  the 
extinction  of  other  interests,  the  livid  vulgarity  even 
of  getting  in,  or  getting  out,  first.  That  had  of  course 
been  so  far  from  really  the  case — with  the  supreme 
idea  all  the  while  growing  and  striking  deep,  under 
everything,  in  the  warm  rich  earth.  He  had  stood 
unknowing,  he  had  walked  and  worked  where  it  was 
buried,  and  the  fact  itself,  the  fact  of  his  fortune, 
would  have  been  a  barren  fact  enough  if  the  first 
sharp  tender  shoot  had  never  struggled  into  day. 
There  on  one  side  was  the  ugliness  his  middle  time  had 

144 


THE   PRINCE 

been  spared ;  there  on  the  other,  from  all  the  portents, 
was  the  beauty  with  which  his  age  might  still  be 
crowned.  He  was  happier  doubtless  than  he  deserved ; 
but  that,  when  one  was  happy  at  all,  it  was  easy  to  be. 
He  had  wrought  by  devious  ways,  but  he  had  reached 
the  place,  and  what  would  ever  have  been  straighter 
in  any  man's  life  than  his  way  henceforth  of  occupying 
it  ?  It  had  n't  merely,  his  plan,  all  the  sanctions  of 
civilisation;  it  was  positively  civilisation  condensed, 
concrete,  consummate,  set  down  by  his  hands  as  a 
house  on  a  rock  —  a  house  from  whose  open  doors 
and  windows,  open  to  grateful,  to  thirsty  millions,  the 
higher,  the  highest  knowledge  would  shine  out  to 
bless  the  land.  In  this  house,  designed  as  a  gift  pri 
marily  to  the  people  of  his  adoptive  city  and  native 
State,  the  urgency  of  whose  release  from  the  bondage 
of  ugliness  he  was  in  a  position  to  measure  —  in  this 
museum  of  museums,  a  palace  of  art  which  was  to 
show  for  compact  as  a  Greek  temple  was  compact,  a 
receptacle  of  treasures  sifted  to  positive  sanctity,  his 
spirit  to-day  almost  altogether  lived,  making  up,  as  he 
would  have  said,  for  lost  time  and  haunting  the  por 
tico  in  anticipation  of  the  final  rites. 

These  would  be  the  "opening  exercises,"  the  august 
dedication  of  the  place.  His  imagination,  he  was  well 
aware,  got  over  the  ground  faster  than  his  judgement; 
there  was  much  still  to  do  for  the  production  of  his 
first  effect.  Foundations  were  laid  and  walls  were 
rising,  the  structure  of  the  shell  all  determined ;  but 
raw  haste  was  forbidden  him  in  a  connexion  so  in 
timate  with  the  highest  effects  of  patience  and  piety; 
he  should  belie  himself  by  completing  without  a 

H5 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

touch  at  least  of  the  majesty  of  delay  a  monument  to 
the  religion  he  wished  to  propagate,  the  exemplary 
passion,  the  passion  for  perfection  at  any  price.  He 
was  far  from  knowing  as  yet  where  he  would  end, 
but  he  was  admirably  definite  as  to  where  he  would  n't 
begin.  He  would  n't  begin  with  a  small  show  —  he 
would  begin  with  a  great,  and  he  could  scarce  have 
indicated,  even  had  he  wished  to  try,  the  line  of  divi 
sion  he  had  drawn.  He  had  taken  no  trouble  to  indi 
cate  it  to  his  fellow  citizens,  purveyors  and  consumers, 
in  his  own  and  the  circumjacent  commonwealths,  of 
comic  matter  in  large  lettering,  diurnally  "set  up," 
printed,  published,  folded  and  delivered,  at  the  expense 
of  his  presumptuous  emulation  of  the  snail.  The  snail 
had  become  for  him,  under  this  ironic  suggestion,  the 
loveliest  beast  in  nature,  and  his  return  to  England, 
of  which  we  are  present  witnesses,  had  n't  been  un 
connected  with  the  appreciation  so  determined.  It 
marked  what  he  liked  to  mark,  that  he  needed,  on 
the  matter  in  question,  instruction  from  no  one  on 
earth.  A  couple  of  years  of  Europe  again,  of  renewed 
nearness  to  changes  and  chances,  refreshed  sensibility 
to  the  currents  of  the  market,  would  fall  in  with  the 
consistency  of  wisdom,  the  particular  shade  of  en 
lightened  conviction,  that  he  wished  to  observe.  It 
did  n't  look  like  much  for  a  whole  family  to  hang  about 
waiting  —  they  being  now,  since  the  birth  of  his 
grandson,  a  whole  family;  and  there  was  henceforth 
only  one  ground  in  all  the  world,  he  felt,  on  which  the 
question  of  appearance  would  ever  really  again  count 
for  him.  He  cared  that  a  work  of  art  of  price  should 
"look  like"  the  master  to  whom  it  might  perhaps  be 

146 


THE   PRINCE 

deceitfully  attributed ;  but  he  had  ceased  on  the  whole 
to  know  any  matter  of  the  rest  of  life  by  its  looks. 

He  took  life  in  general  higher  up  the  stream;  so 
far  as  he  was  n't  actually  taking  it  as  a  collector  he 
was  taking  it  decidedly  as  a  grandfather.  In  the  way 
of  precious  small  pieces  he  had  handled  nothing  so 
precious  as  the  Principino,  his  daughter's  first-born, 
whose  Italian  designation  endlessly  amused  him  and 
whom  he  could  manipulate  and  dandle,  already  almost 
toss  and  catch  again,  as  he  could  n't  a  correspond 
ingly  rare  morsel  of  an  earlier  pate  tendre.  He  could 
take  the  small  clutching  child  from  his  nurse's  arms 
with  an  iteration  grimly  discountenanced,  in  respect 
to  their  contents,  by  the  glass  doors  of  high  cabi 
nets.  Something  clearly  beatific  in  this  new  relation 
had  moreover  without  doubt  confirmed  for  him  the 
sense  that  none  of  his  silent  answers  to  public  de 
traction,  to  local  vulgarity,  had  ever  been  so  legiti 
mately  straight  as  the  mere  element  of  attitude  — 
reduce  it,  he  said,  to  that  —  in  his  easy  weeks  at 
Fawns.  The  element  of  attitude  was  all  he  wanted 
of  these  weeks,  and  he  was  enjoying  it  on  the  spot 
even  more  than  he  had  hoped :  enjoying  it  in  spite  of 
Mrs.  Ranee  and  the  Miss  Lutches ;  in  spite  of  the  small 
worry  of  his  belief  that  Fanny  Assingham  had  really 
something  for  him  that  she  was  keeping  back;  in 
spite  of  his  full  consciousness,  overflowing  the  cup 
like  a  wine  too  generously  poured,  that  if  he  had 
consented  to  marry  his  daughter,  and  thereby  to 
make,  as  it  were,  the  difference,  what  surrounded  him 
now  was  exactly  consent  vivified,  marriage  demon 
strated,  the  difference  in  fine  decidedly  made.  He 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

could  call  back  his  prior,  his  own  wedded  conscious 
ness  —  it  was  n't  yet  out  of  range  of  vague  reflexion. 
He  had  supposed  himself,  above  all  he  had  supposed 
his  wife,  as  married  as  any  one  could  be,  and  yet  he 
wondered  if  their  state  had  deserved  the  name,  or 
their  union  worn  the  beauty,  in  the  degree  to  which 
the  couple  now  before  him  carried  the  matter.  In 
especial  since  the  birth  of  their  boy  in  New  York  — 
the  grand  climax  of  their  recent  American  period, 
brought  to  so  right  an  issue  —  the  happy  pair  struck 
him  as  having  carried  it  higher,  deeper,  further;  to 
where  it  ceased  to  concern  his  imagination  at  any  rate 
to  follow  them.  Extraordinary,  beyond  question,  was 
one  branch  of  his  characteristic  mute  wonderment  — 
it  characterised  above  all,  with  its  subject  before  it, 
his  modesty:  the  strange  dim  doubt,  waking  up  for 
him  at  the  end  of  the  years,  of  whether  Maggie's 
mother  had  after  all  been  capable  of  the  maximum. 
The  maximum  of  tenderness  he  meant  —  as  the  terms 
existed  for  him;  the  maximum  of  immersion  in  the 
fact  of  being  married.  Maggie  herself  was  capable; 
Maggie  herself,  at  this  season,  was,  exquisitely,  di 
vinely,  the  maximum:  such  was  the  impression  that, 
positively  holding  off  a  little  for  the  practical,  the 
tactful  consideration  it  inspired  in  him,  a  respect  for 
the  beauty  and  sanctity  of  it  almost  amounting  to  awe 
—  such  was  the  impression  he  daily  received  from  her. 
She  was  her  mother,  oh  yes  —  but  her  mother  and 
something  more ;  it  becoming  thus  a  new  light  for  him, 
and  in  such  a  curious  way  too,  that  anything  more 
than  her  mother  should  prove  at  this  time  of  day 
possible. 

148 


THE   PRINCE 

He  could  live  over  again  at  almost  any  quiet  mo 
ment  the  long  process  of  his  introduction  to  all  present 
interests  —  an  introduction  that  had  depended  all 
on  himself,  like  the  "cheek"  of  the  young  man  who 
approaches  a  boss  without  credentials  or  picks  up  an 
acquaintance,  makes  even  a  real  friend,  by  speaking 
to  a  passer  in  the  street.  His  real  friend,  in  all  the 
business,  was  to  have  been  his  own  mind,  with  which 
nobody  had  put  him  in  relation.  He  had  knocked  at 
the  door  of  that  essentially  private  house,  and  his  call, 
in  truth,  had  not  been  immediately  answered ;  so  that 
when,  after  waiting  and  coming  back,  he  had  at  last 
got  in,  it  was,  twirling  his  hat,  as  an  embarrassed 
stranger,  or,  trying  his  keys,  as  a  thief  at  night.  He 
had  gained  confidence  only  with  time,  but  when  he  had 
taken  real  possession  of  the  place  it  had  been  never 
again  to  come  away.  All  of  which  success  represented, 
it  must  be  allowed,  his  one  principle  of  pride.  Pride 
in  the  mere  original  spring,  pride  in  his  money,  would 
have  been  pride  in  something  that  had  come,  in  com 
parison,  so  easily.  The  right  ground  for  elation  was 
difficulty  mastered,  and  his  difficulty  —  thanks  to  his 
modesty  —  had  been  to  believe  in  his  facility.  This 
was  the  problem  he  had  worked  out  to  its  solution  — 
the  solution  that  was  now  doing  more  than  all  else  to 
make  his  feet  settle  and  his  days  flush ;  and  when  he 
wished  to  feel  "  good,"  as  they  said  at  American  City, 
he  had  but  to  retrace  his  immense  development.  That 
was  what  the  whole  thing  came  back  to  —  that  the 
development  had  not  been  somebody's  else  passing 
falsely,  accepted  too  ignobly,  for  his.  To  think  how 
servile  he  might  have  been  was  absolutely  to  respect 

149 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

himself,  was  in  fact,  as  much  as  he  liked,  to  admire 
himself,  as  free.  The  very  finest  spring  that  ever  re 
sponded  to  his  touch  was  always  there  to  press  —  the 
memory  of  his  freedom  as  dawning  upon  him,  like 
a  sunrise  all  pink  and  silver,  during  a  winter  divided 
between  Florence,  Rome  and  Naples  some  three  years 
after  his  wife's  death.  It  was  the  hushed  daybreak  of 
the  Roman  revelation  in  particular  that  he  could 
usually  best  recover — the  way  that  there  above  all, 
where  the  princes  and  popes  had  been  before  him,  his 
divination  of  his  faculty  had  gone  to  his  head.  He 
was  a  plain  American  citizen  staying  at  an  hotel  where 
sometimes  for  days  together  there  were  twenty  others 
like  him;  but  no  pope,  no  prince  of  them  all  had  read 
a  richer  meaning,  he  believed,  into  the  character  of 
the  Patron  of  Art.  He  was  ashamed  of  them  really, 
if  he  was  n't  afraid,  and  he  had  on  the  whole  never  so 
climbed  to  the  tip-top  as  in  judging,  over  a  perusal 
of  Hermann  Grimm,  where  Julius  II  and  Leo  X  were 
"  placed  "  by  their  treatment  of  Michael  Angelo.  Far 
below  the  plain  American  citizen  —  in  the  case  at  least 
in  which  this  personage  happened  not  to  be  too  plain 
to  be  Adam  Verver.  Going  to  our  friend's  head, 
moreover,  some  of  the  results  of  such  comparisons 
may  doubtless  be  described  as  having  stayed  there. 
His  freedom  to  see  —  of  which  the  comparisons  were 
part  —  what  could  it  do  but  steadily  grow  and  grow  ? 
It  came  perhaps  even  too  much  to  stand  to  him  for 
all  freedom  —  since  for  example  it  was  as  much  there 
as  ever  at  the  very  time  of  Mrs.  Ranee's  conspiring 
against  him,  at  Fawns,  with  the  billiard-room  and  the 
Sunday  morning,  on  the  occasion  round  which  we  have 

150 


THE  PRINCE 

perhaps  drawn  our  circle  too  wide.  Mrs.  Ranee  at 
least  controlled  practically  each  other  licence  of  the 
present  and  the  near  future :  the  licence  to  pass  the 
hour  as  he  would  have  found  convenient;  the  licence 
to  stop  remembering  for  a  little  that  though  if  pro 
posed  to  —  and  not  only  by  this  aspirant  but  by  any 
other  —  he  would  n't  prove  foolish,  the  proof  of  wis 
dom  was  none  the  less  in  such  a  fashion  rather  cruelly 
conditioned;  the  licence  in  especial  to  proceed  from 
his  letters  to  his  journals  and  insulate,  orientate  him 
self  afresh  by  the  sound,  over  his  gained  interval,  of 
the  many-mouthed  monster  the  exercise  of  whose  lungs 
he  so  constantly  stimulated.  Mrs.  Ranee  remained 
with  him  till  the  others  came  back  from  church,  and 
it  was  by  that  time  clearer  than  ever  that  his  ordeal, 
when  it  should  arrive,  would  be  really  most  unpleasant. 
His  impression  —  this  was  the  point  —  took  somehow 
the  form  not  so  much  of  her  wanting  to  press  home 
her  own  advantage  as  of  her  building  better  than  she 
knew;  that  is  of  her  symbolising,  with  virtual  uncon 
sciousness,  his  own  special  deficiency,  his  unfortunate 
lack  of  a  wife  to  whom  applications  could  be  referred. 
The  applications,  the  contingencies  with  which  Mrs. 
Ranee  struck  him  as  potentially  bristling,  were  really 
not  of  a  sort  to  be  met  by  one's  self.  And  the  pos 
sibility  of  them,  when  his  visitor  said,  or  as  good  as 
said,  "I  'm  restrained,  you  see,  because  of  Mr.  Ranee, 
and  also  because  I  'm  proud  and  refined ;  but  if  it 
was  n't  for  Mr.  Ranee  and  for  my  refinement  and  my 
pride!" — the  possibility  of  them,  I  say,  turned  to  a 
great  murmurous  rustle,  of  a  volume  to  fill  the  future ; 
a  rustle  of  petticoats,  of  scented  many-paged  letters, 

'51 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

of  voices  as  to  which,  distinguish  themselves  as  they 
might  from  each  other,  it  mattered  little  in  what  part 
of  the  resounding  country  they  had  learned  to  make 
themselves  prevail.  The  Assinghams  and  the  Miss 
Lutches  had  taken  the  walk,  through  the  park,  to  the 
little  old  church,  "on  the  property,"  that  our  friend 
had  often  found  himself  wishing  he  were  able  to 
transport,  as  it  stood,  for  its  simple  sweetness,  in  a 
glass  case,  to  one  of  his  exhibitory  halls;  while  Maggie 
had  induced  her  husband,  not  inveterate  in  such  prac 
tices,  to  make  with  her,  by  carriage,  the  somewhat 
longer  pilgrimage  to  the  nearest  altar,  modest  though 
it  happened  to  be,  of  the  faith  —  her  own  as  it  had 
been  her  mother's,  and  as  Mr.  Verver  himself  had 
been  loosely  willing  always  to  let  it  be  taken  for  his 
—  without  the  solid  ease  of  which,  making  the  stage 
firm  and  smooth,  the  drama  of  her  marriage  might  n't 
have  been  acted  out. 

What  at  last  appeared  to  have  happened,  however, 
was  that  the  divided  parties,  coming  back  at  the  same 
moment,  had  met  outside  and  then  drifted  together 
from  empty  room  to  room,  yet  not  in  mere  aimless 
quest  of  the  pair  of  companions  they  had  left  at 
home.  The  quest  had  carried  them  to  the  door  of  the 
billiard-room,  and  their  appearance,  as  it  opened  to 
admit  them,  determined  for  Adam  Verver,  in  the  odd 
est  way  in  the  world,  a  new  and  sharp  perception.  It 
was  really  remarkable :  this  perception  expanded,  on 
the  spot,  as  a  flower,  one  of  the  strangest,  might  at  a 
breath  have  suddenly  opened.  The  breath,  for  that 
matter,  was  more  than  anything  else  the  look  in  his 
daughter's  eyes  —  the  look  with  which  he  saw  her  take 

152 


THE  PRINCE 

in  exactly  what  had  occurred  in  her  absence:  Mrs. 
Ranee's  pursuit  of  him  to  this  remote  locality,  the  spirit 
and  the  very  form,  perfectly  characteristic,  of  his  ac 
ceptance  of  the  complication  —  the  seal  set  in  short 
unmistakeably  on  one  of  Maggie's  anxieties.  The 
anxiety,  it  was  true,  would  have  been,  even  though 
not  imparted,  separately  shared;  for  Fanny  Assing- 
ham's  face  was,  by  the  same  stroke,  not  at  all  thickly 
veiled  for  him,  and  a  queer  light,  of  a  colour  quite  to 
match,  fairly  glittered  in  the  four  fine  eyes  of  the  Miss 
Lutches.  Each  of  these  persons  —  counting  out,  that 
is,  the  Prince  and  the  Colonel,  who  did  n't  care,  and 
who  did  n't  even  see  that  the  others  did  —  knew  some 
thing,  or  had  at  any  rate  had  her  idea;  the  idea,  pre 
cisely,  that  this  was  what  Mrs.  Ranee,  artfully  biding 
her  time,  would  do.  The  special  shade  of  apprehen 
sion  on  the  part  of  the  Miss  Lutches  might  indeed 
have  suggested  the  vision  of  an  energy  supremely  as 
serted.  It  was  droll,  in  truth,  if  one  came  to  that, 
the  position  of  the  Miss  Lutches  :  they  had  themselves 
brought,  they  had  guilelessly  introduced  Mrs.  Ranee, 
strong  in  the  fact  of  Mr.  Ranee's  having  been  literally 
beheld  of  them ;  and  it  was  now  for  them  positively 
as  if  their  handful  of  flowers  —  since  Mrs.  Ranee  was 
a  handful !  —  had  been  but  the  vehicle  of  a  dangerous 
snake.  Mr.  Verver  fairly  felt  in  the  air  the  Miss 
Lutches'  imputation  —  in  the  intensity  of  which, 
really,  his  own  propriety  might  have  been  involved. 
That,  none  the  less,  was  but  a  flicker;  what  made 
the  real  difference,  as  I  have  hinted,  was  his  mute 
passage  with  Maggie.  His  daughter's  anxiety  alone 
had  depths,  and  it  opened  out  for  him  the  wider  that 

153 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

it  was  altogether  new.  When,  in  their  common  past, 
when  till  this  moment,  had  she  shown  a  fear,  however 
dumbly,  for  his  individual  life  ?  They  had  had  fears 
together  just  as  they  had  had  joys,  but  all  of  hers 
at  least  had  been  for  what  equally  concerned  them. 
Here  of  a  sudden  was  a  question  that  concerned  him 
alone,  and  the  soundless  explosion  of  it  somehow 
marked  a  date.  He  was  on  her  mind,  he  was  even  in 
a  manner  on  her  hands  —  as  a  distinct  thing,  that  is, 
from  being,  where  he  had  always  been,  merely  deep 
in  her  heart  and  in  her  life;  too  deep  down,  as  it  were, 
to  be  disengaged,  contrasted  or  opposed,  in  short  object 
ively  presented.  But  time  finally  had  done  it;  their  re 
lation  was  altered  :  he  again  saw  the  difference  lighted 
for  her.  This  marked  it  to  himself —  and  it  was  n't  a 
question  simply  of  a  Mrs.  Ranee  the  more  or  the  less. 
For  Maggie  too  at  a  stroke,  almost  beneficently,  their 
visitor  had,  from  being  an  inconvenience,  become  a 
sign.  They  had  made  vacant  by  their  marriage  his 
immediate  foreground,  his  personal  precinct  —  they 
being  the  Princess  and  the  Prince.  They  had  made 
room  in  it  for  others  —  so  others  had  become  aware. 
He  became  aware  himself,  for  that  matter,  during  the 
minute  Maggie  stood  there  before  speaking;  and  with 
the  sense  moreover  of  what  he  saw  her  see  he  had 
the  sense  of  what  she  saw  him.  This  last,  it  may  be 
added,  would  have  been  his  intensest  perception  had 
n't  there  the  next  instant  been  more  for  him  in  Fanny 
Assingham.  Her  face  could  n't  keep  it  from  him ;  she 
had  seen,  on  top  of  everything,  in  her  quick  way,  what 
they  both  were  seeing. 


Ill 


So  much  mute  communication  was  doubtless  all  this 
time  marvellous,  and  we  may  confess  to  having  per 
haps  read  into  the  scene  prematurely  a  critical  char 
acter  that  took  longer  to  develop.  Yet  the  quiet  hour 
of  reunion  enjoyed  that  afternoon  by  the  father  and 
the  daughter  did  really  little  else  than  deal  with  the 
elements  definitely  presented  to  each  in  the  vibration 
produced  by  the  return  of  the  church-goers.  Nothing 
allusive,  nothing  at  all  insistent,  passed  between  them 
either  before  or  immediately  after  luncheon  —  except 
indeed  so  far  as  their  failure  soon  again  to  meet  might 
be  itself  an  accident  charged  with  reference.  The 
hour  or  two  after  luncheon  —  and  on  Sundays  with 
especial  rigour,  for  one  of  the  domestic  reasons  of 
which  it  belonged  to  Maggie  quite  multitudinously  to 
take  account  —  were  habitually  spent  by  the  Princess 
with  her  little  boy,  in  whose  apartment  she  either  fre 
quently  found  her  father  already  established  or  was 
sooner  or  later  joined  by  him.  His  visit  to  his  grand 
son,  at  some  hour  or  other,  held  its  place,  in  his  day, 
against  all  interventions,  and  this  without  counting  his 
grandson's  visits  to  him,  scarcely  less  ordered  and 
timed,  and  the  odd  bits,  as  he  called  them,  that  they 
picked  up  together  when  they  could  —  communions 
snatched,  for  the  most  part,  on  the  terrace,  in  the 
gardens  or  the  park,  while  the  Principino,  with  much 
pomp  and  circumstance  of  perambulator,  parasol,  fine 

155 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

lace  over-veiling  and  incorruptible  female  attendance, 
took  the  air.  In  the  private  apartments,  which,  occupy 
ing  in  the  great  house  the  larger  part  of  a  wing  of 
their  own,  were  not  much  more  easily  accessible  than 
if  the  place  had  been  a  royal  palace  and  the  small  child 
an  heir-apparent  —  in  the  nursery  of  nurseries  the 
talk,  at  these  instituted  times,  was  always  so  prevail 
ingly  with  or  about  the  master  of  the  scene  that  other 
interests  and  other  topics  had  fairly  learned  to  avoid 
the  slighting  and  inadequate  notice  there  taken  of 
them.  They  came  in  at  the  best  but  as  involved  in 
the  little  boy's  future,  his  past,  or  his  comprehensive 
present,  never  getting  so  much  as  a  chance  to  plead 
their  own  merits  or  to  complain  of  being  neglected. 
Nothing  perhaps  in  truth  had  done  more  than  this 
united  participation  to  confirm  in  the  elder  parties 
that  sense  of  a  life  not  only  uninterrupted  but  more 
deeply  associated,  more  largely  combined,  of  which, 
on  Adam  Verver's  behalf,  we  have  made  some  men 
tion.  It  was  of  course  an  old  story  and  a  familiar  idea 
that  a  beautiful  baby  could  take  its  place  as  a  new 
link  between  a  wife  and  a  husband,  but  Maggie  and 
her  father  had,  with  every  ingenuity,  converted  the 
precious  creature  into  a  link  between  a  mamma  and 
a  grandpapa.  The  Principino,  for  a  chance  spectator 
of  this  process,  might  have  become,  by  an  untoward 
stroke,  a  hapless  half-orphan,  with  the  place  of  imme 
diate  male  parent  swept  bare  and  open  to  the  next 
nearest  sympathy. 

They  had  no  occasion  thus,  the  conjoined  worship 
pers,  to  talk  of  what  the  Prince  might  be  or  might  do 
for  his  son  —  the  sum  of  service,  in  his  absence,  so 


THE   PRINCE 

completely  filled  itself  out.  It  was  not  in  the  least 
moreover  that  there  was  doubt  of  him,  for  he  was  con 
spicuously  addicted  to  the  manipulation  of  the  child, 
in  the  frank  Italian  way,  at  such  moments  as  he  judged 
discreet  in  respect  to  other  claims :  conspicuously  in 
deed,  that  is,  for  Maggie,  who  had  more  occasion,  on 
the  whole,  to  speak  to  her  husband  of  the  extrava 
gance  of  her  father  than  to  speak  to  her  father  of  the 
extravagance  of  her  husband.  Adam  Verver  had,  all 
round,  in  this  connexion,  his  own  serenity.  He  was 
sure  of  his  son-in-law's  auxiliary  admiration  —  ad 
miration,  he  meant,  of  his  grandson;  since,  to  begin 
with,  what  else  had  been  at  work  but  the  instinct  — 
or  it  might  fairly  have  been  the  tradition  —  of  the 
former's  making  the  child  so  solidly  beautiful  as  to 
have  to  be  admired  ?  What  contributed  most  to 
harmony  in  this  play  of  relations,  however,  was  the 
way  the  young  man  seemed  to  leave  it  to  be  gath 
ered  that,  tradition  for  tradition,  the  grandpapa's 
own  was  not,  in  any  estimate,  to  go  for  nothing. 
A  tradition,  or  whatever  it  was,  that  had  flowered  pre- 
lusively  in  the  Princess  herself —  well,  Amerigo's  very 
discretions  were  his  way  of  taking  account  of  it.  His 
discriminations  in  respect  to  his  heir  were  in  fine  not 
more  angular  than  any  others  to  be  observed  in  him; 
and  Mr.  Verver  received  perhaps  from  no  source  so 
distinct  an  impression  of  being  for  him  an  odd  and  im 
portant  phenomenon  as  he  received  from  this  impunity 
of  appropriation,  these  unchallenged  nursery  hours. 
It  was  as  if  the  grandpapa's  special  show  of  the  char 
acter  were  but  another  side  for  the  observer  to  study, 
another  item  for  him  to  note.  It  came  back,  this  latter 

157 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

personage  knew,  to  his  own  previous  perception — that 
of  the  Prince's  inability,  in  any  matter  in  which  he  was 
concerned,  to  conclude.  The  idiosyncrasy,  for  him,  at 
each  stage,  had  to  be  demonstrated  —  on  which,  how 
ever,  he  admirably  accepted  it.  This  last  was  after  all 
the  point;  he  really  worked,  poor  young  man,  for  ac 
ceptance,  since  he  worked  so  constantly  for  compre 
hension.  And  how,  when  you  came  to  that,  could  you 
know  that  a  horse  would  n't  shy  at  a  brass-band,  in 
a  country  road,  because  it  did  n't  shy  at  a  traction- 
engine  ?  It  might  have  been  brought  up  to  traction- 
engines  without  having  been  brought  up  to  brass- 
bands.  Little  by  little  thus  from  month  to  month  the 
Prince  was  learning  what  his  wife's  father  had  been 
brought  up  to;  and  now  it  could  be  checked  off  — 
he  had  been  brought  up  to  the  romantic  view  of  prin- 
cipini.  Who  would  have  thought  it,  and  where  would 
it  all  stop  ?  The  only  fear  somewhat  sharp  for  Mr. 
Verver  was  a  certain  fear  of  disappointing  him  for 
strangeness.  He  felt  that  the  evidence  he  offered,  thus 
viewed,  was  too  much  on  the  positive  side.  He  did  n't 
know  —  he  was  learning,  and  it  was  funny  for  him 
—  to  how  many  things  he  had  been  brought  up.  If 
the  Prince  could  only  strike  something  to  which  he 
had  n't !  This  would  n't,  it  seemed  to  him,  ruffle  the 
smoothness,  and  yet  might  a  little  add  to  the  interest. 
What  was  now  clear  at  all  events  for  the  father  and 
the  daughter  was  their  simply  knowing  they  wanted, 
for  the  time,  to  be  together  —  at  any  cost,  as  it  were ; 
and  their  necessity  so  worked  in  them  as  to  bear  them 
out  of  the  house,  in  a  quarter  hidden  from  that  in  which 
their  friends  were  gathered,  and  cause  them  to  wander, 


THE   PRINCE 

unseen,  unfollowed,  along  a  covered  walk  in  the  "  old  " 
garden,  as  it  was  called,  old  with  an  antiquity  of  formal 
things,  high  box  and  shaped  yew  and  expanses  of  brick 
wall  that  had  turned  at  once  to  purple  and  to  pink. 
They  went  out  of  a  door  in  the  wall,  a  door  that  had 
a  slab  with  a  date  set  above  it,  1713,  but  in  the  old 
multiplied  lettering,  and  then  had  before  them  a  small 
white  gate,  intensely  white  and  clean  amid  all  the 
greenness,  through  which  they  gradually  passed  to 
where  some  of  the  grandest  trees  spaciously  clustered 
and  where  they  would  find  one  of  the  quietest  places. 
A  bench  had  been  placed  long  ago  beneath  a  great 
oak  that  helped  to  crown  a  mild  eminence,  and  the 
ground  sank  away  below  it,  to  rise  again,  opposite,  at 
a  distance  sufficient  to  enclose  the  solitude  and  figure 
a  bosky  horizon.  Summer,  blissfully,  was  with  them 
yet,  and  the  low  sun  made  a  splash  of  light  where  it 
pierced  the  looser  shade;  Maggie,  coming  down  to  go 
out,  had  brought  a  parasol,  which,  as  over  her  charm 
ing  bare  head  she  now  handled  it,  gave,  with  the  big 
straw  hat  that  her  father  in  these  days  always  wore  a 
good  deal  tipped  back,  definite  intention  to  their  walk. 
They  knew  the  bench;  it  was  "sequestered"  —  they 
had  praised  it  for  that  together  before  and  liked  the 
word;  and  after  they  had  begun  to  linger  there  they 
could  have  smiled  (if  they  had  n't  been  really  too  seri 
ous  and  if  the  question  had  n't  so  soon  ceased  to  mat 
ter)  over  the  probable  wonder  of  the  others  as  to  what 
would  have  become  of  them. 

The  extent  to  which  they  enjoyed  their  indifference 
to  any  judgement  of  their  want  of  ceremony,  what  did 
that  of  itself  speak  but  for  the  way  that,  as  a  rule,  they 

*59 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

almost  equally  had  others  on  their  mind  ?  They  each 
knew  that  both  were  full  of  the  superstition  of  not 
"hurting,"  but  might  precisely  have  been  asking  them 
selves,  asking  in  fact  each  other,  at  this  moment, 
whether  that  was  to  be  after  all  the  last  word  of  their 
conscientious  development.  Certain  it  was  at  all 
events  that  in  addition  to  the  Assinghams  and  the 
Lutches  and  Mrs.  Ranee  the  attendance  at  tea  just 
in  the  right  place  on  the  west  terrace  might  perfectly 
comprise  the  four  or  five  persons  —  among  them  the 
very  pretty,  the  typically  Irish  Miss  Maddock,  vaunted 
announced  and  now  brought  —  from  the  couple  of 
other  houses  near  enough,  one  of  these  the  minor  re 
sidence  of  their  proprietor,  established  thriftily,  while 
he  hired  out  his  ancestral  home,  within  sight  and 
sense  of  his  profit.  It  was  n't  less  certain  either  that 
for  once  in  a  way  the  group  in  question  must  all  take 
the  case  as  they  found  it.  Fanny  Assingham,  at  any 
time,  for  that  matter,  might  perfectly  be  trusted  to  see 
Mr.  Verver  and  his  daughter,  to  see  their  reputation 
for  a  decent  friendliness,  through  any  momentary 
danger;  might  be  trusted  even  to  carry  off  their  ab 
sence  for  Amerigo,  for  Amerigo's  possible  funny  Ital 
ian  anxiety;  Amerigo  always  being,  as  the  Princess 
was  well  aware,  conveniently  amenable  to  his  friend's 
explanations,  beguilements,  reassurances,  and  perhaps 
in  fact  rather  more  than  less  dependent  on  them  as 
his  new  life  —  since  that  was  his  own  name  for  it  — 
opened  out.  It  was  no  secret  to  Maggie  —  it  was 
indeed  positively  a  public  joke  for  her  —  that  she 
could  n't  explain  as  Mrs.  Assingham  did,  and  that, 
the  Prince  liking  explanations,  liking  them  almost 

1 60 


THE   PRINCE 

as  if  he  collected  them,  in  the  manner  of  book-plates 
or  postage-stamps,  for  themselves,  his  requisition  of 
this  luxury  had  to  be  met.  He  did  n't  seem  to  want 
them  as  yet  for  use  —  rather  for  ornament  and  amuse 
ment,  innocent  amusement  of  the  kind  he  most  fancied 
and  that  was  so  characteristic  of  his  blessed  beautiful 
general,  his  slightly  indolent  lack  of  more  dissipated 
or  even  just  of  more  sophisticated  tastes. 

However  that  might  be  the  dear  woman  had  come 
to  be  frankly  and  gaily  recognised  —  and  not  least  by 
herself —  as  filling  in  the  intimate  little  circle  an  of 
fice  that  was  not  always  a  sinecure.  It  was  almost  as 
if  she  had  taken,  with  her  kind  melancholy  Colonel  at 
her  heels,  a  responsible  engagement;  to  be  within  call, 
as  it  were,  for  all  those  appeals  that  sprang  out  of  talk, 
that  sprang  not  a  little,  doubtless  too,  out  of  leisure. 
It  naturally  led,  her  position  in  the  household  as  she 
called  it,  to  considerable  frequency  of  presence,  to 
visits,  from  the  good  couple,  freely  repeated  and  pro 
longed,  and  not  so  much  as  under  form  of  protest. 
She  was  there  to  keep  him  quiet  —  it  was  Amerigo's 
own  description  of  her  influence;  and  it  would  only 
have  needed  a  more  visible  disposition  to  unrest  in  him 
to  make  the  account  perfectly  fit.  Fanny  herself  lim 
ited  indeed,  she  minimised,  her  office ;  you  did  n't  need 
a  jailor,  she  contended,  for  a  domesticated  lamb  tied 
up  with  pink  ribbon.  This  was  n't  an  animal  to  be 
controlled  —  it  was  an  animal  to  be,  at  the  most,  edu 
cated.  She  admitted  accordingly  that  she  was  educa 
tive  —  which  Maggie  was  so  aware  that  she  herself 
inevitably  was  n't;  so  it  came  round  to  being  true  that 
what  she  was  most  in  charge  of  was  his  mere  intelli- 

161 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

gence.  This  left,  goodness  knew,  plenty  of  different 
calls  for  Maggie  to  meet  —  in  a  case  in  which  so  much 
pink  ribbon,  as  it  might  be  symbolically  named,  was 
lavished  on  the  creature.  What  it  all  amounted  to  at 
any  rate  was  that  Mrs.  Assingham  would  be  keeping 
him  quiet  now,  while  his  wife  and  his  father-in-law 
carried  out  their  own  little  frugal  picnic;  quite  more 
over,  doubtless,  not  much  less  neededly  in  respect  to 
the  members  of  the  circle  that  were  with  them  there 
than  in  respect  to  the  pair  they  were  missing  almost 
for  the  first  time.  It  was  present  to  Maggie  that  the 
Prince  could  bear,  when  he  was  with  his  wife,  almost 
any  queerness  on  the  part  of  people,  strange  English 
types,  who  bored  him,  beyond  convenience,  by  being 
so  little  as  he  himself  was;  for  this  was  one  of  the  ways 
in  which  a  wife  was  practically  sustaining.  But  she 
was  as  positively  aware  that  she  had  n't  yet  learned  to 
see  him  as  meeting  such  exposure  in  her  absence. 
How  did  he  move  and  walk,  how  above  all  did  he,  or 
how  would  he,  look  —  he  who  with  his  so  nobly  hand 
some  face  could  look  such  wonderful  things  —  in  case 
of  being  left  alone  with  some  of  the  subjects  of  his 
wonder  ?  There  were  subjects  for  wonder  among 
these  very  neighbours;  only  Maggie  herself  had  her 
own  odd  way  —  which  did  n't  moreover  the  least  irri 
tate  him  —  of  really  liking  them  in  proportion  as  they 
could  strike  her  as  strange.  It  came  out  in  her  by 
heredity,  he  amused  himself  with  declaring,  this  love 
of  cbinoiseries;  but  she  actually  this  evening  did  n't 
mind  —  he  might  deal  with  her  Chinese  as  he  could. 
Maggie  indeed  would  always  have  had  for  such  mo 
ments,  had  they  oftener  occurred,  the  impression  made 

162 


THE   PRINCE 

on  her  by  a  word  of  Mrs.  Assingham's,  a  word  refer 
ring  precisely  to  that  appetite  in  Amerigo  for  the  ex 
planatory  which  we  have  just  found  in  our  path.  It 
was  n't  that  the  Princess  could  be  indebted  to  another 
person,  even  to  so  clever  a  one  as  this  friend,  for  seeing 
anything  in  her  husband  that  she  might  n't  see  unaided ; 
but  she  had  ever,  hitherto,  been  of  a  nature  to  accept 
with  modest  gratitude  any  better  description  of  a  felt 
truth  than  her  little  limits  —  terribly  marked,  she 
knew,  in  the  direction  of  saying  the  right  things  —  en 
abled  her  to  make.  Thus  it  was  at  any  rate  that  she 
was  able  to  live  more  or  less  in  the  light  of  the  fact 
expressed  so  lucidly  by  their  common  comforter — the 
fact  that  the  Prince  was  saving  up,  for  some  very  mys 
terious  but  very  fine  eventual  purpose,  all  the  wisdom, 
all  the  answers  to  his  questions,  all  the  impressions  and 
generalisations  he  gathered;  putting  them  away  and 
packing  them  down  because  he  wanted  his  great  gun 
to  be  loaded  to  the  brim  on  the  day  he  should  decide  to 
fire  it  off.  He  wanted  first  to  make  sure  of  the  whole 
of  the  subject  that  was  unrolling  itself  before  him; 
after  which  the  innumerable  facts  he  had  collected 
would  find  their  use.  He  knew  what  he  was  about  — 
trust  him  at  last  therefore  to  make,  and  to  some  effect, 
his  big  noise.  And  Mrs.  Assingham  had  repeated  that 
he  knew  what  he  was  about.  It  was  the  happy  form 
of  this  assurance  that  had  remained  with  Maggie;  it 
could  always  come  in  for  her  that  Amerigo  knew  what 
he  was  about.  He  might  at  moments  seem  vague, 
seem  absent,  seem  even  bored :  this  when,  away  from 
her  father,  with  whom  it  was  impossible  for  him  to 
appear  anything  but  respectfully  occupied,  he  let  his 

163 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

native  gaiety  go  in  outbreaks  of  song,  or  even  of  quite 
whimsical  senseless  sound,  either  expressive  of  inti 
mate  relaxation  or  else  fantastically  plaintive.  He 
might  at  times  reflect  with  the  frankest  lucidity  on  the 
circumstance  that  the  case  was  for  a  good  while  yet 
absolutely  settled  in  regard  to  what  he  still  had  left,  at 
home,  of  his  very  own;  in  regard  to  the  main  seat  of 
his  affection,  the  house  in  Rome,  the  big  black  palace, 
the  Palazzo  Nero,  as  he  was  fond  of  naming  it,  and 
also  on  the  question  of  the  villa  in  the  Sabine  hills, 
which  she  had  at  the  time  of  their  engagement  seen 
and  yearned  over,  and  the  Castello  proper,  described 
by  him  always  as  the  "  perched  "  place,  that  had,  as  she 
knew,  formerly  stood  up,  on  the  pedestal  of  its  moun 
tain-slope,  showing  beautifully  blue  from  afar,  as  the 
head  and  front  of  the  princedom.  He  might  rejoice 
in  certain  moods  over  the  so  long-estranged  state  of 
these  properties,  not  indeed  all  irreclaimably  alienated, 
but  encumbered  with  unending  leases  and  charges, 
with  obstinate  occupants,  with  impossibilities  of  use 
—  all  without  counting  the  cloud  of  mortgages  that 
had  from  far  back  buried  them  beneath  the  ashes  of 
rage  and  remorse,  a  shroud  as  thick  as  the  layer  once 
resting  on  the  towns  at  the  foot  of  Vesuvius,  and  act 
ually  making  of  any  present  restorative  effort  a  pro 
cess  much  akin  to  slow  excavation.  Just  so  he  might 
with  another  turn  of  his  humour  almost  wail  for  these 
brightest  spots  of  his  lost  paradise,  declaring  that  he 
was  an  idiot  not  to  be  able  to  bring  himself  to  face  the 
sacrifices  —  sacrifices  resting,  if  definitely  anywhere, 
with  Mr.  Verver  —  involved  in  winning  them  back. 
One  of  the  most  comfortable  things  between  the 
164 


THE   PRINCE 

husband  and  the  wife  meanwhile — one  of  those  easy 
certitudes  they  could  be  merely  gay  about  —  was  that 
she  never  admired  him  so  much,  or  so  found  him  heart- 
breakingly  handsome,  clever,  irresistible,  in  the  very 
degree  in  which  he  had  originally  and  fatally  dawned 
upon  her,  as  when  she  saw  other  women  reduced  to 
the  same  passive  pulp  that  had  then  begun,  once  for 
all,  to  constitute  her  substance.  There  was  really 
nothing  they  had  talked  of  together  with  more  inti 
mate  and  familiar  pleasantry  than  of  the  licence  and 
privilege,  the  boundless  happy  margin,  thus  estab 
lished  for  each  :  she  going  so  far  as  to  put  it  that,  even 
should  he  some  day  get  drunk  and  beat  her,  the  spec 
tacle  of  him  with  hated  rivals  would,  after  no  matter 
what  extremity,  always,  for  the  sovereign  charm  of 
it,  charm  of  it  in  itself  and  as  the  exhibition  of  him 
that  most  deeply  moved  her,  suffice  to  bring  her  round. 
What  would  therefore  be  more  open  to  him  than  to 
keep  her  in  love  with  him  ?  He  agreed,  with  all  his 
heart,  at  these  light  moments,  that  his  course  would  n't 
then  be  difficult,  inasmuch  as,  so  simply  constituted  as 
he  was  on  all  the  precious  question  —  and  why  should 
he  be  ashamed  of  it  ?  —  he  knew  but  one  way  with  the 
fair.  They  had  to  be  fair  —  and  he  was  fastidious  and 
particular,  his  standard  was  high;  but  when  once  this 
was  the  case  what  relation  with  them  was  conceivable, 
what  relation  was  decent,  rudimentary,  properly 
human,  but  that  of  a  plain  interest  in  the  fairness  ? 
His  interest,  she  always  answered,  happened  not  to  be 
"  plain,"  and  plainness,  all  round,  had  little  to  do  with 
the  matter,  which  was  marked  on  the  contrary  by  the 
richest  variety  of  colour;  but  the  working  basis  at  all 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

events  had  been  settled  —  the  Miss  Maddocks  of  life 
been  assured  of  their  importance  for  him.  How  con 
veniently  assured  Maggie  —  to  take  him  too  into  the 
joke  —  had  more  than  once  gone  so  far  as  to  mention 
to  her  father;  since  it  fell  in  easily  with  the  tenderness 
of  her  disposition  to  remember  she  might  occasionally 
make  him  happy  by  an  intimate  confidence.  This  was 
one  of  her  rules  —  full  as  she  was  of  little  rules,  con 
siderations,  provisions.  There  were  things  she  of 
course  could  n't  tell  him,  in  so  many  words,  about 
Amerigo  and  herself,  and  about  their  happiness  and 
their  union  and  their  deepest  depths  —  and  there  were 
other  things  she  need  n't ;  but  there  were  also  those  that 
were  both  true  and  amusing,  both  communicable  and 
real,  and  of  these,  with  her  so  conscious,  so  delicately- 
cultivated  scheme  of  conduct  as  a  daughter,  she  could 
make  her  profit  at  will. 

A  pleasant  hush,  for  that  matter,  had  fallen  on  most 
of  the  elements  while  she  lingered  apart  with  her  com 
panion;  it  involved,  this  serenity,  innumerable  com 
plete  assumptions:  since  so  ordered  and  so  splendid 
a  rest,  all  the  tokens,  spreading  about  them,  of  confid 
ence  solidly  supported,  might  have  suggested  for  per 
sons  of  poorer  pitch  the  very  insolence  of  facility.  Still, 
they  were  n't  insolent  —  they  were  n't,  our  pair  could 
reflect;  they  were  only  blissful  and  grateful  and  per 
sonally  modest,  not  ashamed  of  knowing,  with  com 
petence,  when  great  things  were  great,  when  good 
things  were  good  and  when  safe  things  were  safe,  and 
not  therefore  placed  below  their  fortune  by  timidity  — 
which  would  have  been  as  bad  as  being  below  it  by 
impudence.  Worthy  of  it  as  they  were,  and  as  each 

166 


THE  PRINCE 

appears,  under  our  last  possible  analysis,  to  have 
wished  to  make  the  other  feel  that  they  were,  what 
they  most  finally  exhaled  into  the  evening  air  as  their 
eyes  mildly  met  may  well  have  been  a  kind  of  helpless 
ness  in  their  felicity.  Their  Tightness,  the  justification 
of  everything  —  something  they  so  felt  the  pulse  of — 
sat  there  with  them ;  but  they  might  have  been  asking 
themselves  a  little  blankly  to  what  further  use  they 
could  put  anything  so  perfect.  They  had  created  and 
nursed  and  established  it;  they  had  housed  it  here  in 
dignity  and  crowned  it  with  comfort;  but  mightn't 
the  moment  possibly  count  for  them  —  or  count  at 
least  for  us  while  we  watch  them  with  their  fate  all  be 
fore  them  —  as  the  dawn  of  the  discovery  that  it 
does  n't  always  meet  all  contingencies  to  be  right  ? 
Otherwise  why  should  Maggie  have  found  a  word  of 
definite  doubt  —  the  expression  of  the  fine  pang  deter 
mined  in  her  a  few  hours  before  —  rise  after  a  time  to 
her  lips  ?  She  took  so  for  granted  moreover  her  com 
panion's  intelligence  of  her  doubt  that  the  mere  vague 
ness  of  her  question  could  say  it  all.  "  What  is  it 
after  all  that  they  want  to  do  to  you  ?  "  '  They  "  were 
for  the  Princess  too  the  hovering  forces  of  which  Mrs. 
Ranee  was  the  symbol,  and  her  father,  only  smiling 
back  now,  at  his  ease,  took  no  trouble  to  appear  not  to 
know  what  she  meant.  What  she  meant  —  when  once 
she  had  spoken — could  come  out  well  enough ;  though 
indeed  it  was  nothing,  after  they  had  come  to  the  point, 
that  could  serve  as  ground  for  a  great  defensive  cam 
paign.  The  waters  of  talk  spread  a  little,  and  Maggie 
presently  contributed  an  idea  in  saying:  "  What  has 
really  happened  is  that  the  proportions,  for  us,  are 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

altered."  He  accepted  equally  for  the  time  this  some 
what  cryptic  remark;  he  still  failed  to  challenge  her 
even  when  she  added  that  it  would  n't  so  much  matter 
if  he  had  n't  been  so  terribly  young.  He  uttered  a 
sound  of  protest  only  when  she  went  on  to  declare  that 
she  ought  as  a  daughter,  in  common  decency,  to  have 
waited.  Yet  by  that  time  she  was  already  herself  ad 
mitting  that  she  should  have  had  to  wait  long  —  if  she 
waited,  that  is,  till  he  was  old.  But  there  was  a  way. 
"  Since  you  are  an  irresistible  youth  we  've  got  to  face 
it.  That's  somehow  what  that  woman  has  made  me 
feel.  There'll  be  others." 


IV 


To  talk  of  it  thus  appeared  at  last  a  positive  relief  to 
him.  "Yes,  there'll  be  others.  But  you'll  see  me 
through." 

She  hesitated.    "  Do  you  mean  if  you  give  in  ? " 

"Oh  no.   Through  my  holding  out." 

Maggie  waited  again,  but  when  she  spoke  it  had  an 
effect  of  abruptness.  "Why  should  you  hold  out  for 
ever?" 

He  gave,  none  the  less,  no  start  —  and  this  as  from 
the  habit  of  taking  anything,  taking  everything,  from 
her  as  harmonious.  But  it  was  quite  written  upon  him 
too,  for  that  matter,  that  holding  out  would  n't  be  so 
very  completely  his  natural  or  at  any  rate  his  acquired 
form.  His  appearance  would  have  testified  that  he 
might  have  to  do  so  a  long  time  —  for  a  man  so  greatly 
beset.  This  appearance,  that  is,  spoke  but  little,  as 
yet,  of  short  remainders  and  simplified  senses  —  and 
all  in  spite  of  his  being  a  small  spare  slightly  stale  per 
son,  deprived  of  the  general  prerogative  of  presence. 
It  was  n't  by  mass  or  weight  or  vulgar  immediate 
quantity  that  he  would  in  the  future,  any  more  than 
he  had  done  in  the  past,  insist  or  resist  or  prevail. 
There  was  even  something  in  him  that  made  his  posi 
tion,  on  any  occasion,  made  his  relation  to  any  scene 
or  to  any  group,  a  matter  of  the  back  of  the  stage, 
of  an  almost  visibly  conscious  want  of  affinity  with  the 
footlights.  He  would  have  figured  less  than  anything 

169 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

the  stage-manager  or  the  author  of  the  play,  who  most 
occupy  the  foreground;  he  might  be  at  the  best  the 
financial  "backer,"  watching  his  interests  from  the 
wing,  but  in  rather  confessed  ignorance  of  the  mys 
teries  of  mimicry.  Barely  taller  than  his  daughter,  he 
pressed  at  no  point  on  the  presumed  propriety  of  his 
greater  stoutness.  He  had  lost  early  in  life  much  of 
his  crisp  closely-curling  hair,  the  fineness  of  which  was 
repeated  in  a  small  neat  beard,  too  compact  to  be  called 
"full,"  though  worn  equally,  as  for  a  mark  where 
other  marks  were  wanting,  on  lip  and  cheek  and  chin. 
His  neat  colourless  face,  provided  with  the  merely  in 
dispensable  features,  suggested  immediately,  for  a 
description,  that  it  was  clear,  and  in  this  manner  some 
what  resembled  a  small  decent  room,  clean-swept  and 
unencumbered  with  furniture,  but  drawing  a  particular 
advantage,  as  might  presently  be  noted,  from  the  out 
look  of  a  pair  of  ample  and  uncurtained  windows. 
There  was  something  in  Adam  Verver's  eyes  that  both 
admitted  the  morning  and  the  evening  in  unusual 
quantities  and  gave  the  modest  area  the  outward  exten 
sion  of  a  view  that  was  "  big  "  even  when  restricted  to 
the  stars.  Deeply  and  changeably  blue,  though  not 
romantically  large,  they  were  yet  youthfully,  almost 
strangely  beautiful,  with  their  ambiguity  of  your 
scarce  knowing  if  they  most  carried  their  possessor's 
vision  out  or  most  opened  themselves  to  your  own. 
Whatever  you  might  feel,  they  stamped  the  place  with 
their  importance,  as  the  house-agents  say;  so  that 
on  one  side  or  the  other  you  were  never  out  of  their 
range,  were  moving  about,  for  possible  community, 
opportunity,  the  sight  of  you  scarce  knew  what,  either 

170 


THE   PRINCE 

before  them  or  behind  them.  If  other  importances,  not 
to  extend  the  question,  kept  themselves  down,  they 
Were  in  no  direction  less  obtruded  than  in  that  of  our 
friend's  dress,  adopted  once  for  all  as  with  a  sort  of 
sumptuary  scruple.  He  wore  every  day  of  the  year, 
whatever  theoccasion,  the  same  little  black  "  cutaway  " 
coat,  of  the  fashion  of  his  younger  time;  he  wore  the 
same  cool-looking  trousers,  chequered  in  black  and 
white  —  the  proper  harmony  with  which,  he  inveter- 
ately  considered,  was  a  white-dotted  blue  satin  neck 
tie;  and,  over  his  concave  little  stomach,  quaintly  in 
different  to  climates  and  seasons,  a  white  duck  waist 
coat.  "  Should  you  really,"  he  now  asked,  "  like  me  to 
marry  ? "  He  spoke  as  if,  coming  from  his  daughter 
herself,  it  might  be  an  idea;  which  for  that  matter 
he  would  be  ready  to  carry  right  straight  out  should 
she  definitely  say  so. 

Definite,  however,  just  yet,  she  was  not  prepared  to 
be,  though  it  seemed  to  come  to  her  with  force,  as  she 
thought,  that  there  was  a  truth  in  the  connexion  to 
utter.  "What  I  feel  is  that  there's  somehow  some 
thing  that  used  to  be  right  and  that  I  've  made  wrong. 
It  used  to  be  right  that  you  had  n't  married  and  that 
you  did  n't  seem  to  want  to.  It  used  also  "  —  she  con 
tinued  to  make  out  —  "to  seem  easy  for  the  question 
not  to  come  up.  That 's  what  I  Ve  made  different.  It 
does  come  up.  It  will  come  up." 

"You  don't  think  I  can  keep  it  down  ?"  Mr.  Ver- 
ver's  tone  was  cheerfully  pensive. 

"Well,  I've  given  you  by  my  move  all  the  trouble 
of  having  to." 

He  liked  the  tenderness  of  her  idea,  and  it  made  him, 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

as  she  sat  near  him,  pass  his  arm  about  her.  "I  guess 
I  don't  feel  as  if  you  had  '  moved '  very  far.  You  Ve 
only  moved  next  door." 

"  Well,'*  she  continued,  "  I  don't  feel  as  if  it  were 
fair  for  me  just  to  have  given  you  a  push  and  left  you 
so.  If  I  've  made  the  difference  for  you  I  must  think 
of  the  difference." 

"Then  what,  darling,"  he  indulgently  asked,  "do 
you  think  ? " 

"That's  just  what  I  don't  yet  know.  But  I  must 
find  out.  We  must  think  together  —  as  we  've  always 
thought.  What  I  mean,"  she  went  on  after  a  moment, 
"is  that  it  strikes  me  I  ought  to  at  least  offer  you 
some  alternative.  I  ought  to  have  worked  one  out  for 
you." 

"An  alternative  to  what?  " 

"Well,  to  your  simply  missing  what  you've  lost  — 
without  anything  being  done  about  it." 

"But  what  have  I  lost?" 

She  thought  a  minute,  as  if  it  were  difficult  to  say, 
yet  as  if  she  more  and  more  saw  it.  "Well,  whatever 
it  was  that  before  kept  us  from  thinking,  and  kept 
you,  really,  as  you  might  say,  in  the  market.  It  was 
as  if  you  could  n't  be  in  the  market  when  you  were 
married  to  me.  Or  rather  as  if  I  kept  people  off,  in 
nocently,  by  being  married  to  you.  Now  that  I  'm 
married  to  some  one  else  you  're,  as  in  consequence, 
married  to  nobody.  Therefore  you  may  be  married  to 
anybody,  to  everybody.  People  don't  see  why  you 
should  n't  be  married  to  them." 

"Is  n't  it  enough  of  a  reason,"  he  mildly  enquired, 
"that  I  don't  want  to  be  ?" 

172 


THE  PRINCE 

"  It 's  enough  of  a  reason,  yes.  But  to  be  enough  of 
a  reason  it  has  to  be  too  much  of  a  trouble.  I  mean 
for  you.  It  has  to  be  too  much  of  a  fight.  You  ask 
me  what  you've  lost,"  Maggie  continued  to  explain. 
"The  not  having  to  take  the  trouble  and  to  make  the 
fight  —  that 's  what  you  've  lost.  The  advantage,  the 
happiness  of  being  just  as  you  were  —  because  I  was 
just  as  /  was  —  that's  what  you  miss." 

"So  that  you  think,"  her  father  presently  said,  "that 
I  had  better  get  married  just  in  order  to  be  as  I  was 
before  ? " 

The  detached  tone  of  it  —  detached  as  if  innocently 
to  amuse  her  by  showing  his  desire  to  accommodate  — 
was  so  far  successful  as  to  draw  from  her  gravity  a 
short  light  laugh.  "  Well,  what  I  don't  want  you  to  ftel 
is  that  if  you  were  to  I  should  n't  understand.  I  should 
understand.  That 's  all,"  said  the  Princess  gently. 

Her  companion  turned  it  pleasantly  over.  "You 
don't  go  so  far  as  to  wish  me  to  take  somebody  I  don't 
like?" 

"Ah  father,"  she  sighed,  "you  know  how  far  I  go 
—  how  far  I  could  go.  But  I  only  wish  that  if  you 
ever  should  like  anybody  you  may  never  doubt  of  my 
feeling  how  I  've  brought  you  to  it.  You  '11  always 
know  that  I  know  it's  my  fault." 

"You  mean,"  he  went  on  in  his  contemplative  way, 
"that  it  will  be  you  who'll  take  the  consequences  ?" 

Maggie  just  considered.  "  I  '11  leave  you  all  the  good 
ones,  but  I  '11  take  the  bad." 

"  Well,  that 's  handsome."  He  emphasised  his  sense 
of  it  by  drawing  her  closer  and  holding  her  more 
tenderly.  "  It 's  about  all  I  could  expect  of  you.  So  far 

173 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

as  you  've  wronged  me  therefore  we  '11  call  it  square. 
I  '11  let  you  know  in  time  if  I  see  a  prospect  of  your 
having  to  take  it  up.  But  am  I  to  understand  mean 
while,"  he  soon  went  on,  "that,  ready  as  you  are  to  see 
me  through  my  collapse,  you  're  not  ready,  or  not  so 
ready,  to  see  me  through  my  resistance  ?  I  've  got  to  be 
a  regular  martyr  before  you  '11  be  inspired  ? " 

She  demurred  at  his  way  of  putting  it.  "Why  if 
you  like  it,  you  know,  it  won't  be  a  collapse." 

"Then  why  talk  about  seeing  me  through  at  all  ?  I 
shall  only  collapse  if  I  do  like  it.  But  what  I  seem 
to  feel  is  that  I  don't  want  to  like  it.  That  is,"  he 
amended,  "unless  I  feel  surer  I  do  than  appears  very 
probable.  I  don't  want  to  have  to  think  I  like  it  in 
a  case  when  I  really  shan't.  I've  had  to  do  that  in 
some  cases,"  he  confessed — "when  it  has  been  a  ques 
tion  of  other  things.  I  don't  want,"  he  wound  up,  "to 
be  made  to  make  a  mistake." 

"Ah  but  it's  too  dreadful,"  she  returned,  "that  you 
should  even  have  to  fear  —  or  just  nervously  to  dream 
—  that  you  may  be.  What  does  that  show,  after  all," 
she  asked,  "  but  that  you  do  really,  well  within,  feel  a 
want  ?  What  does  it  show  but  that  you  're  truly  sus 
ceptible  ? " 

"Well,  it  may  show  that"  —  he  defended  himself 
against  nothing.  "But  it  shows  also,  I  think,  that 
charming  women  are,  in  the  kind  of  life  we  're  leading 
now,  numerous  and  formidable." 

Maggie  entertained  for  a  moment  the  proposition ; 
under  cover  of  which,  however,  she  passed  quickly 
from  the  general  to  the  particular.  "  Do  you  feel  Mrs. 
Ranee  to  be  charming  ? " 

174 


THE   PRINCE 

"Well,  I  feel  her  to  be  formidable.  When  they  cast 
a  spell  it  comes  to  the  same  thing.  I  think  she  'd  do 
anything." 

"Oh  well,  I'd  help  you,"  the  Princess  said  with 
decision,  "as  against  her  —  if  that's  all  you  require. 
It's  too  funny,"  she  went  on  before  he  again  spoke, 
"that  Mrs.  Ranee  should  be  here  at  all.  But  if  you  talk 
of  the  life  we  lead  much  of  it 's  altogether,  I  'm  bound 
to  say,  too  funny.  The  thing  is,"  Maggie  developed 
under  this  impression,  "that  I  don't  think  we  lead,  as 
regards  other  people,  any  life  at  all.  We  don't  at  any 
rate,  it  seems  to  me,  lead  half  the  life  we  might.  And 
so  it  seems,  I  think,  to  Amerigo.  So  it  seems  also,  I  'm 
sure,  to  Fanny  Assingham." 

Mr.  Verver  —  as  if  from  due  regard  for  these  per 
sons  —  considered  a  little.  "  What  life  would  they  like 
us  to  lead  ? " 

"Oh  it's  not  a  question,  I  think,  on  which  they 
quite  feel  together.  She  thinks,  dear  Fanny,  that  we 
ought  to  be  greater." 

"Greater  —  ?"  He  echoed  it  vaguely.  "And 
Amerigo  too,  you  say  ? " 

"Ah  yes" — her  reply  was  prompt — "but  Amer 
igo  does  n't  mind.  He  does  n't  care,  I  mean,  what 
we  do.  It 's  for  us,  he  considers,  to  see  things  exactly 
as  we  wish.  Fanny  herself,"  Maggie  pursued,  "thinks 
he's  magnificent.  Magnificent,  I  mean,  for  taking 
everything  as  it  is,  for  accepting  the  'social  limita 
tions  '  of  our  life,  for  not  missing  what  we  don't  give 
him." 

Mr.  Verver  attended.  "Then  if  he  does  n't  miss 
it  his  magnificence  is  easy." 

175 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"  It  is  easy  —  that 's  exactly  what  I  think.  If  there 
were  things  he  did  miss,  and  if  in  spite  of  them  he  were 
always  sweet,  then,  no  doubt,  he  would  be  a  more  or 
less  unappreciated  hero.  He  could  be  a  hero  —  he  will 
be  one  if  it 's  ever  necessary.  But  it  will  be  about 
something  better  than  our  dreariness.  7  know,"  the 
Princess  declared,  "where  he's  magnificent."  And  she 
rested  a  minute  on  that.  She  ended,  however,  as  she 
had  begun.  "We're  not,  all  the  same,  committed  to 
anything  stupid.  If  we  ought  to  be  grander,  as  Fanny 
thinks,  we  can  be  grander.  There's  nothing  to  pre 
vent." 

"  Is  it  a  strict  moral  obligation  ? "  Adam  Verver 
enquired. 

"No  —  it's  for  the  amusement." 

"  For  whose  ?   For  Fanny's  own  ? " 

"For  every  one's — though  I  dare  say  Fanny's  would 
be  a  large  part."  She  paused;  she  had  now,  it  might 
have  appeared,  something  more  to  bring  out,  which 
she  finally  produced.  "  For  yours  in  particular,  say  — 
if  you  go  into  the  question."  She  even  bravely  fol 
lowed  it  up.  "I  have  n't  really,  after  all,  had  to  think 
much  to  see  that  much  more  can  be  done  for  you  than 
is  done." 

Mr.  Verver  uttered  an  odd  vague  sound.  "Don't 
you  think  a  good  deal 's  done  when  you  come  out  and 
talk  to  me  this  way  ? " 

"Ah,"  said  his  daughter,  smiling  at  him,  "we  make 
too  much  of  that!"  And  then  to  explain:  "That's 
good,  and  it 's  natural  —  but  it  is  n't  great.  We  forget 
that  we  're  as  free  as  air." 

"Well,  that's  great,"  Mr.  Verver  pleaded. 
176 


THE  PRINCE 

"Great  if  we  act  on  it.   Not  if  we  don't." 

She  continued  to  smile,  and  he  took  her  smile ;  won 
dering  again  a  little  by  this  time,  however;  struck  more 
and  more  by  an  intensity  in  it  that  belied  a  light  tone. 
"What  do  you  want,"  he  demanded,  "to  do  to  me  ?" 
And  he  added,  as  she  did  n't  say,  "  You  Ve  got  some 
thing  in  your  mind."  It  had  come  to  him  within  the 
minute  that  from  the  beginning  of  their  session  there 
she  had  been  keeping  something  back,  and  that  an 
impression  of  this  had  more  than  once,  in  spite  of  his 
general  theoretic  respect  for  her  present  right  to  per 
sonal  reserves  and  mysteries,  almost  ceased  to  be 
vague  in  him.  There  had  been  from  the  first  some 
thing  in  her  anxious  eyes,  in  the  way  she  occasionally 
lost  herself,  that  it  would  perfectly  explain.  He  was 
therefore  now  quite  sure.  "You've  got  something  up 
your  sleeve." 

She  had  a  silence  that  made  him  right.  "Well,  when 
I  tell  you  you  '11  understand.  It 's  only  up  my  sleeve  in 
the  sense  of  being  in  a  letter  I  got  this  morning.  All 
day,  yes  —  it  has  been  in  my  mind.  I  've  been  asking 
myself  if  it  were  quite  the  right  moment,  or  in  any 
way  fair,  to  ask  you  if  you  could  stand  just  now 
another  woman." 

It  relieved  him  a  little,  yet  the  beautiful  considera 
tion  of  her  manner  made  it  in  a  degree  portentous. 
"'Stand 'one  —  ?" 

"Well,  mind  her  coming." 

He  stared  —  then  he  laughed.  "  It  depends  on  who 
she  is." 

"There  —  you  see !  I  've  at  all  events  been  thinking 
whether  you'd  take  this  particular  person  but  as  a 

177 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

worry  the  more.  Whether,  that  is,  you  'd  go  so  far 
with  her  in  your  notion  of  having  to  be  kind." 

He  gave  at  this  the  quickest  shake  to  his  foot.  "  How 
far  would  she  go  in  her  notion  of  it  ? " 

"Well,"  his  daughter  returned,  "you  know  how  far, 
in  a  general  way,  Charlotte  Stant  goes." 

"  Charlotte  ?    Is  she  coming  ? " 

"She  writes  me,  practically,  that  she'd  like  to  if 
we're  so  good  as  to  ask  her." 

Mr.  Verver  continued  to  gaze,  but  rather  as  if  wait 
ing  for  more.  Then  as  everything  appeared  to  have 
come  his  expression  had  a  drop.  If  this  was  all  it  was 
simple.  "  Then  why  in  the  world  not  ? " 

Maggie's  face  lighted  anew,  but  it  was  now  an 
other  light.  "  It  is  n't  a  want  of  tact  ? " 

"To  ask  her?" 

"To  propose  it  to  you." 

"That /should  ask  her?" 

He  put  the  question  as  an  effect  of  his  remnant  of 
vagueness,  but  this  had  also  its  own  effect.  Maggie 
wondered  an  instant;  after  which,  as  with  a  flush  of 
recognition,  she  took  it  up.  "  It  would  be  too  beautiful 
if  you  would  !  " 

This,  clearly,  had  not  been  her  first  idea  —  the 
chance  of  his  words  had  prompted  it.  "  Do  you  mean 
write  to  her  myself?" 

"  Yes  —  it  would  be  kind.  It  would  be  quite  beauti 
ful  of  you.  That  is  of  course,"  said  Maggie,  "if  you 
sincerely  can." 

He  appeared  to  wonder  an  instant  why  he  sincerely 
should  n't,  and  indeed,  for  that  matter,  where  the 
question  of  sincerity  came  in.  This  virtue  between 


THE   PRINCE 

him  and  his  daughter's  friend  had  surely  been  taken 
for  granted.  "My  dear  child,"  he  returned,  "I  don't 
think  I  'm  afraid  of  Charlotte." 

"  Well,  that 's  just  what  it 's  lovely  to  have  from  you. 
From  the  moment  you  're  not  —  the  least  little  bit  — 
I  '11  immediately  invite  her." 

"  But  where  in  the  world  is  she  ? "  He  spoke  as 
if  he  had  n't  thought  of  Charlotte,  nor  so  much  as 
heard  her  name  pronounced,  for  a  very  long  time. 
He  quite  in  fact  amicably,  almost  amusedly,  woke 
up  to  her. 

"She's  in  Brittany,  at  a  little  bathing-place,  with 
some  people  I  don't  know.  She 's  always  with  people, 
poor  dear — she  rather  has  to  be;  even  when,  as  is 
sometimes  the  case,  they  're  people  she  does  n't  im 
mensely  like." 

"Well,  I  guess  she  likes  us,"  said  Adam  Verver. 

"  Yes  —  fortunately  she  likes  us.  And  if  I  was  n't 
afraid  of  spoiling  it  for  you,"  Maggie  added,  "  I  'd  even 
mention  that  you  're  not  the  one  of  our  number  she 
likes  least." 

"  Why  should  that  spoil  it  for  me  ? " 

"Oh  my  dear,  you  know.  What  else  have  we 
been  talking  about  ?  It  costs  you  so  much  to  be 
liked.  That's  why  I  hesitated  to  tell  you  of  my  let 
ter." 

He  stared  a  moment  —  as  if  the  subject  had  sud 
denly  grown  out  of  recognition.  "  But  Charlotte  —  on 
other  visits  —  never  used  to  cost  me  anything." 

"No  —  only  her  'keep,'"  Maggie  smiled. 

"Then  I  don't  think  I  mind  her  keep  —  if  that's 
all." 

179 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

The  Princess,  however,  it  was  clear,  wished  to  be 
thoroughly  conscientious.  "  Well,  it  may  not  be  quite 
all.  If  I  think  of  its  being  pleasant  to  have  her,  it's 
because  she  will  make  a  difference." 

"Well,  what's  the  harm  in  that  if  it's  but  a  dif 
ference  for  the  better?" 

"Ah  then  —  there  you  are!"  And  the  Princess 
showed  in  her  smile  her  small  triumphant  wisdom. 
"If  you  acknowledge  a  possible  difference  for  the 
better  we're  not,  after  all,  so  tremendously  right  as 
we  are.  I  mean  we  're  not  —  as  a  family  —  so  intensely 
satisfied  and  amused.  We  do  see  there  are  ways  of 
being  grander." 

"  But  will  Charlotte  Stant,"  her  father  asked  with 
surprise,  "make  us  grander?" 

Maggie,  on  this,  looking  at  him  well,  had  a  remark 
able  reply.  "Yes,  I  think.  Really  grander." 

He  thought;  for  if  here  was  a  sudden  opening  he 
wished  but  the  more  to  meet  it.  "  Because  she 's  so 
handsome  ?" 

"No,  father."  And  the  Princess  was  almost  solemn. 
"Because  she's  so  great." 

«<  Great'  —  ?" 

"Great  in  nature,  in  character,  in  spirit.  Great  in 
life." 

" So  ? "  Mr.  Verver  echoed.  "  What  has  she  done  — 
in  life?" 

"  Well,  she  has  been  brave  and  bright,"  said  Maggie. 
"That  may  n't  sound  like  much,  but  she  has  been  so 
in  the  face  of  things  that  might  well  have  made  it  too 
difficult  for  many  other  girls.  She  has  n't  a  creature 
in  the  world  really  —  that  is  nearly  —  belonging  to 

1 80 


THE  PRINCE 

her.  Only  acquaintances  who,  in  all  sorts  of  ways, 
make  use  of  her,  and  distant  relations  who  are  so 
afraid  she  '11  make  use  of  them  that  they  seldom  let  her 
look  at  them/* 

Mr.  Verver  was  struck  —  and,  as  usual,  to  some 
purpose.  "  If  we  get  her  here  to  improve  us  don't  we 
too  then  make  use  of  her  ? " 

It  pulled  the  Princess  up,  however,  but  an  instant. 
"  We  're  old,  old  friends  —  we  do  her  good  too.  I 
should  always,  even  at  the  worst  —  speaking  for  my 
self —  admire  her  still  more  than  I  used  her." 

"I  see.   That  always  does  good." 

Maggie  seemed  to  consider  his  way  of  putting  it. 
"Certainly  then  —  she  knows  it.  She  knows,  I  mean, 
how  great  I  think  her  courage  and  her  cleverness. 
She's  not  afraid  —  not  of  anything;  and  yet  she  no 
more  ever  takes  a  liberty  with  you  than  if  she  trem 
bled  for  her  life.  And  then  she's  interesting  — 
which  plenty  of  other  people  with  plenty  of  other 
merits  never  are  a  bit."  In  which  fine  flicker  of 
vision  the  truth  widened  to  the  Princess's  view.  "I 
myself  of  course  don't  take  liberties,  but  then  I  do 
always  by  nature  tremble  for  my  life.  That's  the  way 
Hive."  ' 

"Oh  I  say,  love!"  her  father  vaguely  murmured. 

"Yes,  I  live  in  terror,"  she  insisted.  "I'm  a  small 
creeping  thing." 

"You'll  not  persuade  me  that  you're  not  so  good 
as  Charlotte  Stant,"  he  still  placidly  enough  re 
marked. 

"  I  may  be  as  good,  but  I  'm  not  so  great  —  and 
that 's  what  we  're  talking  about.  She  has  a  great  im- 

181 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

agination.  She  has,  in  every  way,  a  great  attitude. 
She  has  above  all  a  great  conscience."  More  perhaps 
than  ever  in  her  life  before  Maggie  addressed  her 
father  at  this  moment  with  a  shade  of  the  absolute  in 
her  tone.  She  had  never  come  so  near  telling  him 
what  he  should  take  it  from  her  to  believe.  "She  has 
only  twopence  in  the  world  —  but  that  has  nothing 
to  do  with  it.  Or  rather  indeed  "  —  she  quickly  cor 
rected  herself —  "it  has  everything.  For  she  does  n't 
care.  I  never  saw  her  do  anything  but  laugh  at 
her  poverty.  Her  life  has  been  harder  than  any  one 
knows. " 

It  was  moreover  as  if,  thus  unprecedentedly  positive, 
his  child  had  an  effect  upon  him  that  Mr.  Verver  really 
felt  as  a  new  thing.  "Why  then  have  n't  you  told  me 
about  her  before  ? " 

"Well,  have  n't  we  always  known  —  ?" 

"I  should  have  thought,"  he  submitted,  "that  we 
had  already  pretty  well  sized  her  up." 

"Certainly — we  long  ago  quite  took  her  for  granted. 
But  things  change  with  time,  and  I  seem  to  know 
that  after  this  interval  I'm  going  to  like  her  better 
than  ever.  I  Ve  lived  more  myself,  I  'm  older,  and 
one  judges  better.  Yes,  I'm  going  to  see  in  Char 
lotte,"  said  the  Princess  —  and  speaking  now  as  with 
high  and  free  expectation  —  "  more  than  I  've  ever 
seen." 

"Then  I '11  try  to  do  so  too.  She  was"  —  it  came 
back  to  Mr.  Verver  more  —  "  the  one  of  your  friends 
I  thought  the  best  for  you." 

His  companion,  however,  was  so  launched  in  her 
permitted  liberty  of  appreciation  that  she  for  the  mo- 

182 


THE  PRINCE 

ment  scarce  heard  him.  She  was  lost  in  the  case  she 
made  out,  the  vision  of  the  different  ways  in  which 
Charlotte  had  distinguished  herself.  "She'd  have 
liked  for  instance  —  I  'm  sure  she  'd  have  liked  ex 
tremely  —  to  marry ;  and  nothing  in  general  is  more 
ridiculous,  even  when  it  has  been  pathetic,  than  a 
woman  who  has  tried  and  has  n't  been  able." 

It  had  all  Mr.  Verver's  attention.  "She  has 
'tried'  —  ?" 

"She  has  seen  cases  where  she  would  have 
liked  to." 

"  But  she  has  n't  been  able  ? " 

"  Well,  there  are  more  cases,  in  Europe,  in  which  it 
does  n't  come  to  girls  who  are  poor  than  in  which 
it  does  come  to  them.  Especially,"  said  Maggie  with 
her  continued  competence,  "when  they're  Ameri 
cans." 

Well,  her  father  now  met  her,  and  met  her  cheer 
fully,  on  all  sides.  "  Unless  you  mean,"  he  suggested, 
"that  when  the  girls  are  American  there  are  more  cases 
in  which  it  comes  to  the  rich  than  to  the  poor." 

She  looked  at  him  good-humouredly.  "That  may 
be  —  but  I  'm  not  going  to  be  smothered  in  my  case.  It 
ought  to  make  me  —  if  I  were  in  danger  of  being  a 
fool  —  all  the  nicer  to  people  like  Charlotte.  It 's  not 
hard  for  me,"  she  shrewdly  explained,  "not  to  be 
ridiculous  —  unless  in  a  very  different  way.  I  might 
easily  be  ridiculous,  I  suppose,  by  behaving  as  if  I 
thought  I  had  done  a  great  thing.  Charlotte  at  any 
rate  has  done  nothing,  and  any  one  can  see  it,  and  see 
also  that  it 's  rather  strange ;  and  yet  no  one  —  no  one 
not  awfully  presumptuous  or  offensive  —  would  like, 

183 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

or  would  dare,  to  treat  her,  just  as  she  is,  as  anything 
but  quite  right.  That 's  what  it  is  to  have  something 
about  you  that  carries  things  off." 

Mr.  Verver's  silence  on  this  could  only  be  a  sign 
that  she  had  caused  her  story  to  interest  him ;  though 
the  sign  when  he  spoke  was  perhaps  even  sharper. 
"And  is  it  also  what  you  mean  by  Charlotte's  being 
'great'?" 

"  Well,"  said  Maggie,  "  it 's  one  of  her  ways.  But 
she  has  many." 

Again  for  a  little  her  father  considered.  "And  who 
is  it  she  has  tried  to  marry  ? " 

Maggie,  on  her  side  as  well,  waited  as  if  to  bring 
it  out  with  effect;  but  she  after  a  minute  either  re 
nounced  or  encountered  an  obstacle.  "  I  'm  afraid  I  'm 
not  sure." 

"  Then  how  do  you  know  ? " 

"Well,  I  don't  know"  —  and,  qualifying  again,  she 
was  earnestly  emphatic.  "  I  only  make  it  out  for  my 
self." 

"  But  you  must  make  it  out  about  some  one  in  par 
ticular." 

She  had  another  pause.  "  I  don't  think  I  want  even 
for  myself  to  put  names  and  times,  to  pull  away  any 
veil.  I've  an  idea  there  has  been,  more  than  once, 
somebody  I  'm  not  acquainted  with  —  and  need  n't  be 
or  want  to  be.  In  any  case  it 's  all  over,  and,  beyond 
giving  her  credit  for  everything,  it 's  none  of  my  busi 
ness." 

Mr.  Verver  deferred,  yet  he  discriminated.  "  I  don't 
see  how  you  can  give  credit  without  knowing  the 
facts." 

184 


THE  PRINCE 

"Can't  I  give  it — generally — for  dignity  ?  Dignity, 
I  mean,  in  misfortune." 

"  You  've  got  to  postulate  the  misfortune  first." 

"Well,"  said  Maggie,  "I  can  do  that.  Is  n't  it  al 
ways  a  misfortune  to  be  —  when  you  're  so  fine  —  so 
wasted  ?  And  yet,"  she  went  on,  "  not  to  wail  about 
it,  not  to  look  even  as  if  you  knew  it  ? " 

Mr.  Verver  seemed  at  first  to  face  this  as  a  large 
question,  and  then,  after  a  little,  solicited  by  another 
view,  to  let  the  appeal  drop.  "Well,  she  must  n't  be 
wasted.  We  won't  at  least  have  waste." 

It  produced  in  Maggie's  face  another  gratitude. 
"Then,  dear  sir,  that's  all  I  want." 

And  it  would  apparently  have  settled  their  question 
and  ended  their  talk  if  her  father  had  n't,  after  a 
little,  shown  the  disposition  to  revert.  "How  many 
times  are  you  supposing  she  has  tried  ? " 

Once  more,  at  this,  and  as  if  she  had  n't  been, 
could  n't  be,  hated  to  be,  in  such  delicate  matters,  lit 
eral,  she  was  moved  to  attenuate.  "Oh  I  don't  say 
she  absolutely  ever  tried  — ! " 

He  looked  perplexed.  "But  if  she  has  so  abso 
lutely  failed,  what  then  has  she  done?" 

"She  has  suffered  —  she  has  done  that."  And 
the  Princess  added  :  "  She  has  loved  —  and  she  has 
lost." 

Mr.  Verver,  however,  still  wondered.  "But  how 
many  times?" 

Maggie  hesitated,  but  it  cleared  up.  "Once  is 
enough.  Enough,  that  is,  for  one  to  be  kind  to 
her." 

Her  father  listened,  yet  not  challenging  —  only  as 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

with  a  need  of  some  basis  on  which,  under  these  new 
lights,  his  bounty  could  be  firm.  "But  has  she  told 
you  nothing?" 

"Ah  thank  goodness,  no!" 

He  stared.    "Then  don't  young  women  tell?" 

"Because,  you  mean,  it's  just  what  they're  sup 
posed  to  do  ? "  She  looked  at  him,  flushed  again  now; 
with  which,  after  another  hesitation,  "  Do  young  men 
tell  ? "  she  asked. 

He  gave  a  short  laugh.  "  How  do  I  know,  my  dear, 
what  young  men  do  ?" 

"Then  how  do  I  know,  father,  what  vulgar  girls 
do?" 

"  I  see  —  I  see,"  he  quickly  returned. 

But  she  spoke  the  next  moment  as  if  she  might, 
odiously,  have  been  sharp.  "What  happens  at  least  is 
that  where  there 's  a  great  deal  of  pride  there 's  a  great 
deal  of  silence.  I  don't  know,  I  admit,  what  /  should 
do  if  I  were  lonely  and  sore  —  for  what  sorrow,  to 
speak  of,  have  I  ever  had  in  my  life  ?  I  don't  know 
even  if  I  'm  proud  —  it  seems  to  me  the  question  has 
never  come  up  for  me." 

"Oh  I  guess  you  're  proud,  Mag,"  her  father  cheer 
fully  interposed.  "  I  mean  I  guess  you  're  proud 
enough." 

"  Well  then  I  hope  I  'm  humble  enough  too.  I 
might  at  all  events,  for  all  I  know,  be  abject  under  a 
blow.  How  can  I  tell  ?  Do  you  realise,  father,  that 
I  've  never  had  the  least  blow  ? " 

He  gave  her  a  long  quiet  look.  "  Who  should  realise 
if  I  don't?" 

"Well,  you'll  realise  when  I  have  one!"  she  ex- 
186 


THE   PRINCE 

claimed  with  a  short  laugh  that  resembled,  as  for  good 
reasons,  his  own  of  a  minute  before.  "  I  would  n't 
in  any  case  have  let  her  tell  me  what  would  have  been 
dreadful  to  me.  For  such  wounds  and  shames  are 
dreadful :  at  least,  "  she  added,  catching  herself  up,  "  I 
suppose  they  are;  for  what,  as  I  say,  do  I  know  of 
them  ?  I  don't  want  to  know ! "  —  she  spoke  quite  with 
vehemence.  "There  are  things  that  are  sacred  — 
whether  they  're  joys  or  pains.  But  one  can  always,  for 
safety,  be  kind,"  she  kept  on;  "one  feels  when  that's 
right." 

She  had  got  up  with  these  last  words;  she  stood 
there  before  him  with  that  particular  suggestion  in  her 
aspect  to  which  even  the  long  habit  of  their  life  to 
gether  had  n't  closed  his  sense,  kept  sharp,  year  after 
year,  by  the  collation  of  types  and  signs,  the  compar 
ison  of  fine  object  with  fine  object,  of  one  degree  of 
finish,  of  one  form  of  the  exquisite  with  another  —  the 
appearance  of  some  slight  slim  draped  "  antique  "  of 
Vatican  or  Capitoline  halls,  late  and  refined,  rare  as 
a  note  and  immortal  as  a  link,  set  in  motion  by  the 
miraculous  infusion  of  a  modern  impulse  and  yet,  for 
all  the  sudden  freedom  of  folds  and  footsteps  forsaken 
after  centuries  by  their  pedestal,  keeping  still  the  qual 
ity,  the  perfect  felicity,  of  the  statue ;  the  blurred  ab 
sent  eyes,  the  smoothed  elegant  nameless  head,  the 
impersonal  flit  of  a  creature  lost  in  an  alien  age  and 
passing  as  an  image  in  worn  relief  round  and  round 
a  precious  vase.  She  had  always  had  odd  moments 
of  striking  him,  daughter  of  his  very  own  though  she 
was,  as  a  figure  thus  simplified,  "generalised"  in  its 
grace,  a  figure  with  which  his  human  connexion  was 

187 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

fairly  interrupted  by  some  vague  analogy  of  turn  and 
attitude,  something  shyly  mythological  and  nymph- 
like.  The  trick,  he  was  n't  uncomplacently  aware,  was 
mainly  of  his  own  mind ;  it  came  from  his  caring  for 
precious  vases  only  less  than  for  precious  daughters. 
And  what  was  more  to  the  point  still,  it  often  oper 
ated  while  he  was  quite  at  the  same  time  conscious 
that  Maggie  had  been  described,  even  in  her  pretti- 
ness,  as  "prim"  —  Mrs.  Ranee  herself  had  enthusias 
tically  used  the  word  for  her;  while  he  remembered 
that  when  once  she  had  been  told  before  him  familiarly 
that  she  resembled  a  nun  she  had  replied  that  she  was 
delighted  to  hear  it  and  would  certainly  try  to;  while 
also,  finally,  it  was  present  to  him  that,  discreetly 
heedless,  through  her  long  association  with  noble 
ness  in  art,  to  the  leaps  and  bounds  of  fashion,  she 
brought  her  hair  down  very  straight  and  flat  over  her 
temples,  in  the  constant  manner  of  her  mother,  who 
had  n't  been  a  bit  mythological.  Nymphs  and  nuns 
were  certainly  separate  types,  but  Mr.  Verver,  when 
he  really  amused  himself,  let  consistency  go.  The 
play  of  vision  was  at  all  events  so  rooted  in  him  that 
he  could  receive  impressions  of  sense  even  while  posi 
tively  thinking.  He  was  positively  thinking  while 
Maggie  stood  there,  and  it  led  for  him  to  yet  another 
question  —  which  in  its  turn  led  to  others  still.  "  Do 
you  regard  the  condition  as  hers  then  that  you  spoke 
of  a  minute  ago  ? " 

"The  condition  —  ? " 

"  Why  that  of  having  loved  so  intensely  that  she 's, 
as  you  say,  '  beyond  everything '  ? " 

Maggie  had  scarcely  to  reflect  — her  answer  was  so 
188 


THE  PRINCE 

prompt.  "Oh  no.  She's  beyond  nothing.  For  she 
has  had  nothing." 

"I  see.  You  must  have  had  things  to  be  beyond 
them.  It 's  a  kind  of  law  of  perspective." 

Maggie  did  n't  know  about  the  law,  but  con 
tinued  definite.  "She's  not,  for  example,  beyond 
help." 

"Oh  well  then  she  shall  have  all  we  can  give  her. 
I'll  write  to  her,"  he  said,  "with  pleasure." 

"Angel!"  she  answered  as  she  gaily  and  tenderly 
looked  at  him. 

True  as  this  might  be,  however,  there  was  one  thing 
more  —  he  was  an  angel  with  a  human  curiosity. 
"  Has  she  told  you  she  likes  me  much  ? " 

"Certainly  she  has  told  me  —  but  I  won't  pamper 
you.  Let  it  be  enough  for  you  it  has  always  been  one 
of  my  reasons  for  liking  her" 

"Then  she's  indeed  not  beyond  everything,"  Mr. 
Verver  more  or  less  humorously  observed. 

"Oh  it  is  n't,  thank  goodness,  that  she 's  in  love  with 
you.  It's  not,  as  I  told  you  at  first,  the  sort  of  thing 
for  you  to  fear." 

He  had  spoken  with  cheer,  but  it  appeared  to  drop 
before  this  reassurance,  as  if  the  latter  overdid  his 
alarm,  and  that  should  be  corrected.  "Oh  my  dear, 
I  've  always  thought  of  her  as  a  little  girl." 

"Ah  she's  not  a  little  girl,"  said  the  Princess. 

"Then  I  '11  write  to  her  as  a  brilliant  woman." 

"It 's  exactly  what  she  is." 

Mr.  Verver  had  got  up  as  he  spoke,  and  for  a  little, 
before  retracing  their  steps,  they  stood  looking  at  each 
other  as  if  they  had  really  arranged  something.  They 

189 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

had  come  out  together  for  themselves,  but  it  had  pro 
duced  something  more.  What  it  had  produced  was 
in  fact  expressed  by  the  words  wkh  which  he  met  his 
companion's  last  emphasis.  "Well,  she  has  a  famous 
friend  in  you,  Princess." 

Maggie  took  this  in  —  it  was  too  plain  for  a  protest. 
"Do  you  know  what  I'm  really  thinking  of?"  she 
asked. 

He  wondered,  with  her  eyes  on  him  —  eyes  of  con 
tentment  at  her  freedom  now  to  talk;  and  he  was  n't 
such  a  fool,  he  presently  showed,  as  not,  suddenly,  to 
arrive  at  it.  "  Why  of  your  finding  her  at  last  your 
self  a  husband." 

"Good  for  you!"  Maggie  smiled.  "But  it  will 
take,"  she  added,  "some  looking." 

"  Then  let  me  look  right  here  with  you,"  her  father 
said  as  they  walked  on. 


MRS.  ASSINGHAM  and  the  Colonel,  quitting  Fawns 
before  the  end  of  September,  had  come  back  later  on; 
and  now,  a  couple  of  weeks  after,  they  were  again  in 
terrupting  their  stay,  but  this  time  with  the  question  of 
their  return  left  to  depend  on  matters  that  were  rather 
hinted  at  than  importunately  named.  The  Lutches 
and  Mrs.  Ranee  had  also,  by  the  action  of  Charlotte 
Stant's  arrival,  ceased  to  linger,  though  with  hopes 
and  theories,  as  to  some  promptitude  of  renewal,  of 
which  the  lively  expression,  awaking  the  echoes  of  the 
great  stone-paved,  oak-panelled,  galleried  hall  that 
was  not  the  least  interesting  feature  of  the  place, 
seemed  still  a  property  of  the  air.  It  was  on  this  ad 
mirable  spot  that,  before  her  October  afternoon  had 
waned,  Fanny  Assingham  spent  with  her  easy  host  a 
few  moments  which  led  to  her  announcing  her  own 
and  her  husband's  final  secession,  at  the  same  time  as 
they  tempted  her  to  point  the  moral  of  all  vain  rever 
berations.  The  double  door  of  the  house  stood  open 
to  an  effect  of  hazy  autumn  sunshine,  a  wonderful 
windless  waiting  golden  hour  under  the  influence  of 
which  Adam  Verver  met  his  genial  friend  as  she  came 
to  drop  into  the  post-box  with  her  own  hand  a  thick 
sheaf  of  letters.  They  presently  thereafter  left  the 
house  together  and  drew  out  half  an  hour  on  the  ter 
race  in  a  manner  they  were  to  revert  to  in  thought, 
later  on,  as  that  of  persons  who  really  had  been  taking 

191 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

leave  of  each  other  at  a  parting  of  the  ways.  He  traced 
his  impression,  on  coming  to  consider,  back  to  a  mere 
three  words  she  had  begun  by  using  about  Charlotte 
Stant.  Charlotte  simply  "  cleared  them  out "  —  those 
had  been  the  three  words,  thrown  off  in  reference  to 
the  general  golden  peace  that  the  Kentish  October  had 
gradually  ushered  in,  the  "halcyon"  days  the  full 
beauty  of  which  had  appeared  to  shine  out  for  them 
after  that  young  lady's  arrival.  For  it  was  during  these 
days  that  Mrs.  Ranee  and  the  Miss  Lutches  had  been 
observed  to  be  gathering  themselves  for  departure,  and 
it  was  with  that  difference  made  that  the  sense  of  the 
whole  situation  showed  most  fair  —  the  sense  of  how 
right  they  had  been  to  engage  for  so  ample  a  resid 
ence,  and  of  all  the  pleasure  so  fruity  an  autumn 
there  could  hold  in  its  lap.  This  was  what  had  oc 
curred,  that  their  lesson  had  been  learned;  and  what 
Mrs.  Assingham  had  dwelt  upon  was  that  without 
Charlotte  it  would  have  been  learned  but  half.  It 
would  certainly  not  have  been  taught  by  Mrs.  Ranee 
and  the  Miss  Lutches  if  these  ladies  had  remained 
with  them  as  long  as  at  one  time  seemed  probable. 
Charlotte's  light  intervention  had  thus  become  a  cause, 
operating  covertly  but  none  the  less  actively,  and 
Fanny  Assingham's  speech,  which  she  had  followed 
up  a  little,  echoed  within  him,  fairly  to  startle  him,  as 
the  indication  of  something  irresistible.  He  could  see 
now  how  this  superior  force  had  worked,  and  he  fairly 
liked  to  recover  the  sight  —  little  harm  as  he  dreamed 
of  doing,  little  ill  as  he  dreamed  of  wishing,  the  three 
ladies,  whom  he  had  after  all  entertained  for  a  stiffish 
series  of  days.  She  had  been  so  vague  and  quiet  about 

192 


THE  PRINCE 

it,  wonderful  Charlotte,  that  he  had  n't  known  what 
was  happening — happening,  that  is,  as  a  result  of  her 
influence.  "Their  fires,  as  they  felt  her,  turned  to 
smoke,"  Mrs.  Assingham  remarked;  which  he  was 
to  reflect  on  indeed  even  while  they  strolled.  He  had 
retained,  since  his  long  talk  with  Maggie  —  the  talk 
that  had  settled  the  matter  of  his  own  direct  invitation 
to  her  friend  —  an  odd  little  taste,  as  he  would  have 
described  it,  for  hearing  things  said  about  this  young 
woman,  hearing,  so  to  speak,  what  could  be  said  about 
her :  almost  as  if  her  portrait,  by  some  eminent  hand, 
were  going  on,  so  that  he  watched  it  grow  under  the 
multiplication  of  touches.  Mrs.  Assingham,  it  struck 
him,  applied  two  or  three  of  the  finest  in  their  discus 
sion  of  their  young  friend  —  so  different  a  figure  now 
from  that  early  playmate  of  Maggie's  as  to  whom  he 
could  almost  recall  from  of  old  the  definite  occasions 
of  his  having  paternally  lumped  the  two  children 
together  in  the  recommendation  that  they  should  n't 
make  too  much  noise  nor  eat  too  much  jam.  His  com 
panion  professed  that  in  the  light  of  Charlotte's  prompt 
influence  she  had  n't  been  a  stranger  to  a  pang  of  pity 
for  their  recent  visitors.  "I  felt  in  fact  privately  so 
sorry  for  them  that  I  kept  my  impression  to  myself 
while  they  were  here  —  wishing  not  to  put  the  rest  of 
you  on  the  scent;  neither  Maggie,  nor  the  Prince,  nor 
yourself,  nor  even  Charlotte  herself,  if  you  did  n't  hap 
pen  to  notice.  Since  you  did  n't,  apparently,  I  perhaps 
now  strike  you  as  extravagant.  But  I  'm  not  —  I  fol 
lowed  it  all.  One  saw  the  consciousness  I  speak  of 
come  over  the  poor  things,  very  much  as  I  suppose  peo 
ple  at  the  court  of  the  Borgias  may  have  watched  each 

193 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

other  begin  to  look  queer  after  having  had  the  honour 
of  taking  wine  with  the  heads  of  the  family.  My 
comparison's  only  a  little  awkward,  for  I  don't  in  the 
least  mean  that  Charlotte  was  consciously  dropping 
poison  into  their  cup.  She  was  just  herself  their 
poison,  in  the  sense  of  mortally  disagreeing  with  them 

—  but  she  did  n't  know  it." 

"Ah  she  did  n't  know  it?"  Mr.  Verver  had  asked 
with  interest. 

"Well,  I  think  she  did  n't"  —  Mrs.  Assingham  had 
tp  admit  that  she  had  n't  pressingly  sounded  her.  "  I 
don't  pretend  to  be  sure  in  every  connexion  of  what 
Charlotte  knows.  She  does  n't  certainly  like  to  make 
people  suffer  —  not,  in  general,  as  is  the  case  with  so 
many  of  us,  even  other  women :  she  likes  much  rather 
to  put  them  at  their  ease  with  her.  She  likes,  that  is 

—  as  all  pleasant  people  do  —  to  be  liked." 

"Ah  she  likes  to  be  liked?"  her  companion  had 
gone  on. 

"  She  did  at  the  same  time,  no  doubt,  want  to  help 
us  —  to  put  us  at  our  ease.  That  is  she  wanted  to  put 
you  —  and  to  put  Maggie  about  you.  So  far  as  that 
went  she  had  a  plan.  But  it  was  only  after  —  it  was 
not  before,  I  really  believe  —  that  she  saw  how  effect 
ively  she  could  work." 

Again,  as  Mr.  Verver  felt,  he  must  have  taken  it  up. 
"Ah  she  wanted  to  help  us  ?  —  wanted  to  help  me?" 

"Why,"  Mrs.  Assingham  asked  after  an  instant, 
"  should  it  surprise  you  ? " 

He  just  thought.   "Oh  it  does  n't!" 

"  She  saw  of  course  as  soon  as  she  came,  with  her 
quickness,  where  we  all  were.  She  did  n't  need  each 

194 


THE   PRINCE 

of  us  to  go  by  appointment  to  her  room  at  night,  or  to 
take  her  out  into  the  fields,  for  our  palpitating  tale. 
No  doubt  even  she  was  rather  impatient." 

"0/the  poor  things?"  Mr.  Verver  had  here  en 
quired  while  he  waited. 

"  Well,  of  your  not  yourselves  being  so  —  and  of 
your  not  in  particular.  I  have  n't  the  least  doubt 
in  the  world,  par  exemple,  that  she  thinks  you  too 
meek." 

"Oh  she  thinks  me  too  meek?" 

"And  she  had  been  sent  for,  on  the  very  face  of  it, 
to  work  right  in.  All  she  had  to  do  after  all  was  to 
be  nice  to  you." 

"To  —  a  —  me  ? "  said  Adam  Verver. 

He  could  remember  now  that  his  friend  had  posi 
tively  had  a  laugh  for  his  tone.  "To  you  and  to  every 
one.  She  had  only  to  be  what  she  is  —  and  to  be  it  all 
round.  If  she 's  charming,  how  can  she  help  it  ?  So 
it  was,  and  so  only,  that  she  '  acted '  —  as  the  Borgia 
wine  used  to  act.  One  saw  it  come  over  them  —  the 
extent  to  which,  in  her  particular  way,  a  woman,  a 
woman  other,  and  so  other,  than  themselves,  could  be 
charming.  One  saw  them  understand  and  exchange 
looks,  then  one  saw  them  lose  heart  and  decide  to 
move.  For  what  they  had  to  take  home  was  that  it 's 
she  who's  the  real  thing." 

"  Ah  it 's  she  who 's  the  real  thing  ? "  As  be  had  n't 
hitherto  taken  it  home  as  completely  as  the  Miss 
Lutches  and  Mrs.  Ranee,  so  doubtless  he  had  now  a 
little  appeared  to  offer  submission  in  his  appeal.  "I 
see,  I  see  " — he  could  at  least  simply  take  it  home  now ; 
yet  as  not  without  wanting  at  the  same  time  to  be  sure 

195 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

of  what  the  real  thing  was.  "And  what  would  it  be  — 
a  —  definitely  that  you  understand  by  that  ? " 

She  had  only  for  an  instant  not  found  it  easy  to  say. 
"Why  exactly  what  those  women  themselves  want 
to  be,  and  what  her  effect  on  them  is  to  make  them 
recognise  that  they  never  will." 

"  Oh  —  of  course  never ! " 

It  not  only  remained  with  them  and  hung  about 
them,  it  positively  developed  and  deepened,  after  this 
talk,  that  the  luxurious  side  of  his  personal  existence 
was  now  again  furnished,  socially  speaking,  with  the 
thing  classed  and  stamped  as  "  real "  —  just  as  he  had 
been  able  to  think  of  it  as  not  otherwise  enriched  in 
consequence  of  his  daughter's  marriage.  The  note  of 
reality,  in  so  much  projected  light,  continued  to  have 
for  him  the  charm  and  the  importance  of  which  the 
maximum  had  occasionally  been  reached  in  his  great 
"finds";  it  continued,  beyond  any  other,  to  keep 
him  attentive  and  gratified.  Nothing  perhaps  might 
affect  us  as  queerer,  had  we  time  to  look  into  it,  than 
this  application  of  the  same  measure  of  value  to  such 
different  pieces  of  property  as  old  Persian  carpets, 
say,  and  new  human  acquisitions;  all  the  more  in 
deed  that  the  amiable  man  was  not  without  an  ink 
ling  on  his  own  side  that  he  was,  as  a  taster  of  life, 
economically  constructed.  He  put  into  his  one  little 
glass  everything  he  raised  to  his  lips,  and  it  was  as  if 
he  had  always  carried  in  his  pocket,  like  a  tool  of  his 
trade,  this  receptacle,  a  little  glass  cut  with  a  fineness 
of  which  the  art  had  long  since  been  lost,  and  kept  in 
an  old  morocco  case  stamped  in  uneffaceable  gilt  with 
the  arms  of  a  deposed  dynasty.  As  it  had  served  him 

196 


THE  PRINCE 

to  satisfy  himself,  so  to  speak,  both  about  Amerigo  and 
about  the  Bernardino  Luini  he  had  happened  to  come 
to  knowledge  of  at  the  time  he  was  consenting  to  the 
announcement  of  his  daughter's  betrothal,  so  it  served 
him  at  present  to  satisfy  himself  about  Charlotte 
Stant  and  an  extraordinary  set  of  oriental  tiles  of 
which  he  had  lately  got  wind,  to  which  a  provoking 
legend  was  attached,  and  as  to  which  he  had  made 
out  contentedly  that  further  news  was  to  be  obtained 
from  a  certain  Mr.  Gutermann-Seuss  of  Brighton.  It 
was  all  at  bottom  in  him,  the  aesthetic  principle, 
planted  where  it  could  burn  with  a  cold  still  flame; 
where  it  fed  almost  wholly  on  the  material  directly 
involved,  on  the  idea  (followed  by  appropriation)  of 
plastic  beauty,  of  the  thing  visibly  perfect  in  its  kind ; 
where,  in  short,  despite  the  general  tendency  of  the 
"devouring  element"  to  spread,  the  rest  of  his  spirit 
ual  furniture,  modest  scattered  and  tended  with 
unconscious  care,  escaped  the  consumption  that  in 
so  many  cases  proceeds  from  the  undue  keeping-up 
of  profane  altar-fires.  Adam  Verver  had  in  other 
words  learnt  the  lesson  of  the  senses,  to  the  end  of  his 
own  little  book,  without  having  for  a  day  raised  the 
smallest  scandal  in  his  economy  at  large;  being  in  this 
particular  not  unlike  those  fortunate  bachelors  or  other 
gentlemen  of  pleasure  who  so  manage  their  entertain 
ment  of  compromising  company  that  even  the  auster- 
est  housekeeper,  occupied  and  competent  below-stairs, 
never  feels  obliged  to  give  warning. 

That  figure  has  however  a  freedom  for  us  that  the 
occasion  doubtless  scarce  demands,  though  we  may 
retain  it  for  its  rough  negative  value.  It  was  to  come 

197 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

to  pass,  by  a  pressure  applied  to  the  situation  wholly 
from  within,  that  before  the  first  ten  days  of  November 
had  elapsed  he  found  himself  practically  alone  at 
Fawns  with  his  young  friend;  Amerigo  and  Maggie 
having,  with  a  certain  abruptness,  invited  his  assent  to 
their  going  abroad  for  a  month,  since  his  amusement 
was  now  scarce  less  happily  assured  than  his  security. 
An  impulse  eminently  natural  had  stirred  within  the 
Prince ;  his  life,  as  for  some  time  established,  was  de- 
liciously  dull,  and  thereby  on  the  whole  what  he  best 
liked;  but  a  small  gust  of  yearning  had  swept  over 
him,  and  Maggie  repeated  to  her  father  with  infinite 
admiration  the  pretty  terms  in  which,  after  it  had 
lasted  a  little,  he  had  described  to  her  this  experience. 
He  called  it  a  "  serenade,"  a  low  music  that,  outside 
one  of  the  windows  of  the  sleeping  house,  disturbed  his 
rest  at  night.  Timid  as  it  was,  and  plaintive,  he  yet 
could  n't  close  his  eyes  for  it,  and  when  finally,  rising 
on  tiptoe,  he  had  looked  out,  he  had  recognised  in  the 
figure  below  with  a  mandolin,  all  duskily  draped  in  her 
grace,  the  raised  appealing  eyes  and  the  one  irresistible 
voice  of  the  ever-to-be-loved  Italy.  Sooner  or  later, 
that  way,  one  had  to  listen ;  it  was  a  hovering  haunting 
ghost,  as  of  a  creature  to  whom  one  had  done  a  wrong, 
a  dim  pathetic  shade  crying  out  to  be  comforted.  For 
this  there  was  obviously  but  one  way  —  as  these  were 
doubtless  also  many  words  for  the  simple  fact  that  so 
prime  a  Roman  had  a  fancy  for  again  seeing  Rome. 
They  would  accordingly — had  n't  they  better  ? — go 
for  a  little;  Maggie  meanwhile  making  the  too-ab- 
surdly  artful  point  with  her  father,  so  that  he  repeated 
it  in  his  amusement  to  Charlotte  Stant,  to  whom  he 

198 


was  by  this  time  conscious  of  addressing  many  re 
marks,  that  it  was  absolutely,  when  she  came  to  think, 
the  first  thing  Amerigo  had  ever  asked  of  her.  "She 
does  n't  count  of  course  his  having  asked  of  her  to 
marry  him  "  —  this  was  Mr.  Verver's  indulgent  criti 
cism  ;  but  he  found  Charlotte,  equally  touched  by  the 
ingenuous  Maggie,  in  easy  agreement  with  him  over 
the  question.  If  the  Prince  had  asked  something  of  his 
wife  every  day  in  the  year  this  would  be  still  no  reason 
why  the  poor  dear  man  should  n't,  in  a  beautiful  fit 
of  homesickness,  revisit  without  reproach  his  native 
country. 

What  his  father-in-law  frankly  counselled  was  that 
the  reasonable,  the  really  too  reasonable  pair  should, 
while  they  were  about  it,  take  three  or  four  weeks  of 
Paris  as  well  —  Paris  being  always  for  Mr.  Verver  in 
any  stress  of  sympathy  a  suggestion  that  rose  of  itself 
to  the  lips.  If  they  would  only  do  that,  on  their  way 
back  or  however  they  preferred  it,  Charlotte  and  he 
would  go  over  to  join  them  there  for  a  small  look  — 
though  even  then,  assuredly,  as  he  had  it  at  heart  to 
add,  not  in  the  least  because  they  should  have  found 
themselves  bored  at  being  left  together.  The  fate  of 
this  last  proposal  indeed  was  that  it  reeled  for  the 
moment  under  an  assault  of  destructive  analysis  from 
Maggie,  who  —  having,  as  she  granted,  to  choose  be 
tween  being  an  unnatural  daughter  or  an  unnatural 
mother,  and  "electing"  for  the  former  —  wanted  to 
know  what  would  become  of  the  Principino  if  the 
house  were  cleared  of  every  one  but  the  servants.  Her 
question  had  fairly  resounded,  but  it  had  afterwards, 
like  many  of  her  questions,  dropped  still  more  effect- 

199 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

ively  than  it  had  risen:  the  highest  moral  of  the 
matter  being,  before  the  couple  took  their  departure, 
that  Mrs.  Noble  and  Dr.  Brady  must  mount  unchal 
lenged  guard  over  the  august  little  crib.  If  she  had  n't 
supremely  believed  in  the  majestic  value  of  the  nurse, 
whose  experience  was  in  itself  the  amplest  of  pillows, 
just  as  her  attention  was  a  spreading  canopy  from 
which  precedent  and  reminiscence  dropped  as  thickly 
as  parted  curtains  —  if  she  had  n't  been  able  to  rest  in 
this  confidence  she  would  fairly  have  sent  her  hus 
band  on  his  journey  without  her.  In  the  same  man 
ner,  if  the  sweetest  —  for  it  was  so  she  qualified  him 
—  of  little  country  doctors  had  n't  proved  to  her  his 
wisdom  by  rendering  irresistible,  especially  on  rainy 
days  and  in  direct  proportion  to  the  frequency  of  his 
calls,  adapted  to  all  weathers,  that  she  should  con 
verse  with  him  for  hours  over  causes  and  consequences, 
over  what  he  had  found  to  answer  with  his  little  five 
at  home,  she  would  have  drawn  scant  support  from 
the  presence  of  a  mere  grandfather  and  a  mere  bril 
liant  friend.  These  persons,  accordingly,  her  own  pre 
dominance  having  thus  for  the  time  given  way,  could 
carry  with  a  certain  ease,  and  above  all  with  mutual 
aid,  their  consciousness  of  a  charge.  So  far  as  their 
office  weighed  they  could  help  each  other  with  it  — 
which  was  in  fact  to  become,  as  Mrs.  Noble  herself 
loomed  larger  for  them,  not  a  little  of  a  relief  and  a 
diversion. 

Mr.  Verver  met  his  young  friend,  at  certain  hours, 
in  the  day-nursery,  very  much  as  he  had  regularly 
met  the  child's  fond  mother  —  Charlotte  having,  as 
she  clearly  considered,  given  Maggie  equal  pledges 

200 


THE   PRINCE 

and  desiring  never  to  fail  of  the  last  word  for  the 
daily  letter  she  had  promised  to  write.  She  wrote 
with  high  fidelity,  she  let  her  companion  know,  and 
the  effect  of  it  was,  remarkably  enough,  that  he  him 
self  did  n't  write.  The  reason  of  this  was  partly  that 
Charlotte  "told  all  about  him"  —  which  she  also  let 
him  know  she  did  —  and  partly  that  he  enjoyed  feeling, 
as  a  consequence,  that  he  was  generally,  quite  sys 
tematically,  eased  and,  as  they  said, "  done  "  for.  Com 
mitted,  as  it  were,  to  this  charming  and  clever  young 
woman,  who,  by  becoming  for  him  a  domestic  re 
source  had  become  for  him  practically  a  new  person 
—  and  committed  especially  in  his  own  house,  which 
somehow  made  his  sense  of  it  a  deeper  thing  —  he 
took  an  interest  in  seeing  how  far  the  connexion 
could  carry  him,  could  perhaps  even  lead  him,  and  in 
thus  putting  to  the  test,  for  pleasant  verification,  what 
Fanny  Assingham  had  said  at  the  last  about  the  dif 
ference  such  a  girl  could  make.  She  was  really  making 
one  now,  in  their  simplified  existence,  and  a  very  con 
siderable  one,  though  there  was  no  one  to  compare 
her  with,  as  there  had  been  so  usefully  for  Fanny  — 
no  Mrs.  Ranee,  no  Kitty,  no  Dotty  Lutch,  to  help  her 
to  be  felt,  according  to  Fanny's  diagnosis,  as  real. 
She  was  real,  decidedly,  from  other  causes,  and  Mr. 
Verver  grew  in  time  even  a  little  amused  at  the 
amount  of  machinery  Mrs.  Assingham  had  seemed 
to  see  needed  for  pointing  it.  She  was  directly  and 
immediately  real,  real  on  a  pleasantly  reduced  and  in 
timate  scale,  and  at  no  moments  more  so  than  during 
those  —  at  which  we  have  just  glanced  —  when  Mrs. 
Noble  made  them  both  together  feel  that  she,  she 

20 1 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

alone,  in  the  absence  of  the  queen-mother,  was  regent 
of  the  realm  and  governess  of  the  heir.  Treated  on 
such  occasions  as  at  best  a  pair  of  dangling  and  mere 
ly  nominal  court-functionaries,  picturesque  hereditary 
triflers  entitled  to  the  petites  entrees  but  quite  external 
to  the  State,  which  began  and  ended  with  the  Nursery, 
they  could  only  retire,  in  quickened  sociability,  to  what 
was  left  them  of  the  Palace,  there  to  digest  their  gilded 
insignificance  and  cultivate,  in  regard  to  the  true  Ex 
ecutive,  such  snufF-taking  ironies  as  might  belong  to 
rococo  chamberlains  moving  among  china  lap-dogs. 

Every  evening  after  dinner  Charlotte  Stant  played 
to  him;  seated  at  the  piano  and  requiring  no  music 
she  went  through  his  "favourite  things"  —  and  he 
had  many  favourites — with  a  facility  that  never  failed, 
or  that  failed  but  just  enough  to  pick  itself  up  at  a 
touch  from  his  fitful  voice.  She  could  play  anything, 
she  could  play  everything  —  always  shockingly,  she  of 
course  insisted,  but  always,  by  his  own  vague  measure, 
very  much  as  if  she  might,  slim  sinuous  and  strong, 
and  with  practised  passion,  have  been  playing  lawn- 
tennis  or  endlessly  and  rhythmically  waltzing.  His 
love  of  music,  unlike  his  other  loves,  owned  to  vague 
nesses,  but  while,  on  his  comparatively  shaded  sofa, 
and  smoking,  smoking,  always  smoking,  in  the  great 
Fawns  drawing-room  as  everywhere,  the  cigars  of  his 
youth,  rank  with  associations  —  while,  I  say,  he  so 
listened  to  Charlotte's  piano,  where  the  score  was 
ever  absent  but,  between  the  lighted  candles,  the  pict 
ure  distinct,  the  vagueness  spread  itself  about  him  like 
some  boundless  carpet,  a  surface  delightfully  soft  to 
the  pressure  of  his  interest.  It  was  a  manner  of  pass- 

202 


THE  PRINCE 

ing  the  time  that  rather  replaced  conversation,  but 
the  air  at  the  end  none  the  less,  before  they  separated, 
had  a  way  of  seeming  full  of  the  echoes  of  talk.  They 
separated,  in  the  hushed  house,  not  quite  easily,  yet 
not  quite  awkwardly  either,  with  tapers  that  twinkled 
in  the  large  dark  spaces,  and  for  the  most  part  so 
late  that  the  last  solemn  servant  had  been  dismissed 
for  the  night. 

Late  as  it  was  on  a  particular  evening  toward  the 
end  of  October,  there  had  been  a  full  word  or  two 
dropped  into  the  still-stirring  sea  of  other  voices  —  a 
word  or  two  that  affected  our  friend  even  at  the  mo 
ment,  and  rather  oddly,  as  louder  and  rounder  than 
any  previous  sound ;  and  then  he  had  lingered,  under 
pretext  of  an  opened  window  to  be  made  secure,  after 
taking  leave  of  his  companion  in  the  hall  and  watching 
her  glimmer  away  up  the  staircase.  He  had  for  him 
self  another  impulse  than  to  go  to  bed ;  picking  up  a 
hat  in  the  hall,  slipping  his  arms  into  a  sleeveless  cape 
and  lighting  still  another  cigar,  he  turned  out  upon 
the  terrace  through  one  of  the  long  drawing-room 
windows  and  moved  to  and  fro  there  for  an  hour  be 
neath  the  sharp  autumn  stars.  It  was  where  he  had 
walked  in  the  afternoon  sun  with  Fanny  Assingham, 
and  the  sense  of  that  other  hour,  the  sense  of  the  sug 
gestive  woman  herself,  was  before  him  again  as,  in 
spite  of  all  the  previous  degustation  we  have  hinted  at, 
it  had  n't  yet  been.  He  thought,  in  a  loose,  an  almost 
agitated  order,  of  many  things;  the  power  that  was 
in  them  to  agitate  having  been  part  of  his  conviction 
that  he  should  n't  soon  sleep.  He  truly  felt  for  a  while 
that  he  should  never  sleep  again  till  something  had 

203 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

come  to  him;  some  light,  some  idea,  some  mere  happy 
word  perhaps,  that  he  had  begun  to  want,  but  had 
been  till  now,  and  especially  the  last  day  or  two, 
vainly  groping  for.  "  Can  you  really  then  come  if  we 
start  early  ? "  —  that  was  practically  all  he  had  said  to 
the  girl  as  she  took  up  her  bedroom  light.  And  "  Why 
in  the  world  not,  when  I've  nothing  else  to  do  and 
should  besides  so  immensely  like  it  ? "  —  this  had  as 
definitely  been,  on  her  side,  the  limit  of  the  little 
scene.  There  had  in  fact  been  nothing  to  call  a  scene, 
even  of  the  littlest,  at  all  —  though  he  perhaps  did  n't 
quite  know  why  something  like  the  menace  of  one 
had  n't  proceeded  from  her  stopping  halfway  up 
stairs  to  turn  and  say,  as  she  looked  down  on  him, 
that  she  promised  to  content  herself,  for  their  journey, 
with  a  toothbrush  and  a  sponge.  There  hovered  about 
him  at  all  events,  while  he  walked,  appearances  al 
ready  familiar,  as  well  as  two  or  three  that  were  new, 
and  not  the  least  vivid  of  the  former  connected  itself 
with  that  sense  of  being  treated  with  consideration 
which  had  become  for  him,  as  we  have  noted,  one  of 
the  minor,  yet,  so  far  as  there  were  any  such,  quite  one 
of  the  compensatory,  incidents  of  being  a  father-in- 
law.  It  had  struck  him  up  to  now  that  this  particular 
balm  was  a  mixture  of  which  Amerigo,  owing  to 
some  hereditary  privilege,  alone  possessed  the  secret; 
so  that  he  found  himself  wondering  if  it  had  come  to 
Charlotte,  who  had  unmistakeably  acquired  it, 
through  the  young  man's  having  amiably  passed  it  on. 
She  made  use,  for  her  so  quietly  grateful  host,  however 
this  might  be,  of  quite  the  same  shades  of  attention 
and  recognition,  was  mistress  in  an  equal  degree  of 

204 


THE  PRINCE 

the  regulated,  the  developed  art  of  placing  him  high  in 
the  scale  of  importance.  That  was  even  for  his  own 
thought  a  clumsy  way  of  expressing  the  element  of 
similarity  in  the  agreeable  effect  they  each  produced 
on  him,  and  it  held  him  for  a  little  only  because  this 
coincidence  in  their  felicity  caused  him  vaguely  to 
connect  or  associate  them  in  the  matter  of  tradition, 
training,  tact,  or  whatever  else  one  might  call  it.  It 
might  almost  have  been  —  if  such  a  link  between  them 
was  to  be  imagined  —  that  Amerigo  had  a  little 
"coached"  or  incited  their  young  friend,  or  perhaps 
rather  that  she  had  simply,  as  one  of  the  signs  of  the 
general  perfection  Fanny  Assingham  commended  in 
her,  profited  by  observing,  during  her  short  oppor 
tunity  before  the  start  of  the  travellers,  the  pleasant 
application  by  the  Prince  of  his  personal  system.  He 
might  wonder  what  exactly  it  was  that  they  so  re 
sembled  each  other  in  treating  him  like  —  from  what 
noble  and  propagated  convention,  in  cases  in  which 
the  exquisite  "importance"  was  to  be  neither  too 
grossly  attributed  nor  too  grossly  denied,  they  had 
taken  their  specific  lesson;  but  the  difficulty  was  here 
of  course  that  one  could  really  never  know  —  could  n't 
know  without  having  been  one's  self  a  personage; 
whether  a  Pope,  a  King,  a  President,  a  Peer,  a  Gen 
eral,  or  just  a  beautiful  Author. 

Before  such  a  question,  as  before  several  others 
when  they  recurred,  he  would  come  to  a  pause,  leaning 
his  arms  on  the  old  parapet  and  losing  himself  in  a 
far  excursion.  He  had  as  to  so  many  of  the  matters 
in  hand  a  divided  view,  and  this  was  exactly  what 
made  him  reach  out,  in  his  unrest,  for  some  idea,  lurk- 

205 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

ing  in  the  vast  freshness  of  the  night,  at  the  breath  of 
which  disparities  would  submit  to  fusion  and  so, 
spreading  beneath  him,  make  him  feel  he  floated. 
What  he  kept  finding  himself  return  to,  disturbingly 
enough,  was  the  reflexion,  deeper  than  anything  else, 
that  in  forming  a  new  and  intimate  tie  he  should  in 
a  manner  abandon,  or  at  the  best  signally  relegate,  his 
daughter.  He  should  reduce  to  definite  form  the  idea 
that  he  had  lost  her  —  as  was  indeed  inevitable  —  by 
her  own  marriage ;  he  should  reduce  to  definite  form 
the  idea  of  his  having  incurred  an  injury,  or  at  the  best 
an  inconvenience,  that  required  some  makeweight  and 
deserved  some  amends.  And  he  should  do  this  the 
more,  which  was  the  great  point,  that  he  should  ap 
pear  to  adopt  in  doing  it  the  sentiment,  in  fact  the 
very  conviction,  entertained  and  quite  sufficiently  ex 
pressed  by  Maggie  herself  in  her  beautiful  generosity, 
as  to  what  he  had  suffered  —  putting  it  with  extrava 
gance  —  at  her  hands.  If  she  put  it  with  extravagance 
the  extravagance  was  yet  sincere,  for  it  came  —  which 
she  put  with  extravagance  too  —  from  her  persistence 
always  in  thinking,  feeling,  talking  about  him  as 
young.  He  had  had  glimpses  of  moments  when  to 
hear  her  thus,  in  her  absolutely  unforced  compunc 
tion,  one  would  have  supposed  the  special  edge  of  the 
wrong  she  had  done  him  to  consist  in  his  having  still 
before  him  years  and  years  to  groan  under  it.  She  had 
sacrificed  a  parent,  the  pearl  of  parents,  no  older  than 
herself:  it  would  n't  so  much  have  mattered  if  he  had 
been  of  common  parental  age.  That  he  was  n't,  that 
he  was  just  her  extraordinary  equal  and  contemporary, 
this  was  what  added  to  her  act  the  long  train  of  its 

206 


THE   PRINCE 

effect.  Light  broke  for  him  at  last,  indeed,  quite  as  a 
consequence  of  the  fear  of  breathing  a  chill  upon  this 
luxuriance  of  her  spiritual  garden.  As  at  a  turn  of  his 
labyrinth  he  saw  his  issue,  which  opened  out  so  wide, 
for  the  minute,  that  he  held  his  breath  with  wonder. 
He  was  afterwards  to  recall  how  just  then  the  autumn 
night  seemed  to  clear  to  a  view  in  which  the  whole 
place,  everything  round  him,  the  wide  terrace  where 
he  stood,  the  others,  with  their  steps,  below,  the  gar 
dens,  the  park,  the  lake,  the  circling  woods,  lay  there 
as  under  some  strange  midnight  sun.  It  all  met  him 
during  these  instants  as  a  vast  expanse  of  discovery, 
a  world  that  looked,  so  lighted,  extraordinarily  new, 
and  in  which  familiar  objects  had  taken  on  a  distinct 
ness  that,  as  if  it  had  been  a  loud,  a  spoken  pretension 
to  beauty,  interest,  importance,  to  he  scarce  knew 
what,  gave  them  an  inordinate  quantity  of  character 
and  verily  an  inordinate  size.  The  hallucination,  or 
whatever  he  might  have  called  it,  was  brief,  but  it 
lasted  long  enough  to  leave  him  gasping.  The  gasp  of 
admiration  had  by  this  time  however  lost  itself  in  an 
intensity  that  quickly  followed  —  the  way  the  wonder 
of  it,  since  wonder  was  in  question,  truly  had  been  the 
strange  delay  of  his  vision.  He  had  these  several  days 
groped  and  groped  for  an  object  that  lay  at  his  feet 
and  as  to  which  his  blindness  came  from  his  stupidly 
looking  beyond.  It  had  sat  all  the  while  at  his  hearth 
stone,  whence  it  now  gazed  up  in  his  face. 

Once  he  had  recognised  it  there  everything  became 
coherent.  The  sharp  point  to  which  all  his  light  con 
verged  was  that  the  whole  call  of  his  future  to  him 
as  a  father  would  be  in  his  so  managing  that  Maggie 

207 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

would  less  and  less  appear  to  herself  to  have  forsaken 
him.  And  it  not  only  would  n't  be  decently  humane, 
decently  possible,  not  to  make  this  relief  easy  to  her  — 
the  idea  shone  upon  him,  more  than  that,  as  exciting, 
inspiring,  uplifting.  It  fell  in  so  beautifully  with  what 
might  be  otherwise  possible ;  it  stood  there  absolutely 
confronted  with  the  material  way  in  which  it  might  be 
met.  The  way  in  which  it  might  be  met  was  by  his 
putting  his  child  at  peace,  and  the  way  to  put  her  at 
peace  was  to  provide  for  his  future  —  that  is  for  hers 
—  by  marriage,  by  a  marriage  as  good,  speaking  pro 
portionately,  as  hers  had  been.  As  he  fairly  inhaled 
this  measure  of  refreshment  he  tasted  the  meaning  of 
recent  agitations.  He  had  seen  that  Charlotte  could 
contribute  —  what  he  had  n't  seen  was  what  she  could 
contribute  to.  When  it  had  all  supremely  cleared  up 
and  he  had  simply  settled  this  service  to  his  daughter 
well  before  him  as  the  proper  direction  of  his  young 
friend's  leisure,  the  cool  darkness  had  again  closed 
round  him,  but  his  moral  lucidity  was  constituted. 
It  was  n't  only  moreover  that  the  word,  with  a  click,  so 
fitted  the  riddle,  but  that  the  riddle,  in  such  perfection, 
fitted  the  word.  He  might  have  been  equally  in  want 
and  yet  not  have  had  his  remedy.  Oh  if  Charlotte 
did  n't  accept  him  the  remedy  of  course  would  fail ; 
but,  as  everything  had  fallen  together,  it  was  at  least 
there  to  be  tried.  And  success  would  be  great  —  that 
was  his  last  throb  —  if  the  measure  of  relief  effected 
for  Maggie  should  at  all  prove  to  have  been  given  by 
his  own  actual  sense  of  felicity.  He  really  did  n't 
know  when  in  his  life  he  had  thought  of  anything 
happier.  To  think  of  it  merely  for  himself  would  have 

208 


THE  PRINCE 

been,  even  as  he  had  just  lately  felt,  even  doing  all 
justice  to  that  condition  —  yes,  impossible.  But  there 
was  a  grand  difference  in  thinking  of  it  for  his 
child. 


VI 


IT  was  at  Brighton  above  all  that  this  difference  came 
out;  it  was  during  the  three  wonderful  days  he  spent 
there  with  Charlotte  that  he  had  acquainted  himself 
further  —  though  doubtless  not  even  now  quite  com 
pletely  —  with  the  merits  of  his  majestic  scheme.  And 
while  moreover,  to  begin  with,  he  still  but  held  his 
vision  in  place,  steadying  it  fairly,  with  his  hands,  as 
he  had  often  steadied  for  inspection  a  precarious  old 
pot  or  kept  a  glazed  picture  in  its  right  relation  to  the 
light,  the  other,  the  outer  presumptions  in  his  favour, 
those  independent  of  what  he  might  himself  contribute 
and  that  therefore,  till  he  should  "speak,"  remained 
necessarily  vague  —  that  quantity,  I  say,  struck  him 
as  positively  multiplying,  as  putting  on,  in  the  fresh 
Brighton  air  and  on  the  sunny  Brighton  front,  a  kind 
of  tempting  palpability.   He  liked,  at  this  preliminary 
stage,  to  feel  he  should  be  able  to  "  speak  "  and  that  he 
would;  the  word  itself  being  romantic,  pressing  for 
him  the  spring  of  association  with  stories  and  plays 
where  handsome  and  ardent  young  men,  in  uniforms, 
tights,  cloaks,  high-boots,  had  it,  in  soliloquies,  ever 
on  their  lips;  and  the  sense  on  the  first  day  that  he 
should  probably  have  taken  the  great  step  before  the 
second  was  over  conduced  already  to  make  him  say 
to  his  companion  that  they  must  spend  more  than 
their  mere  night  or  two.  At  his  ease  on  the  ground  of 
what  was  before  him  he  at  all  events  definitely  desired 

210 


THE   PRINCE 

to  be,  and  it  was  strongly  his  impression  that  he  was 
proceeding  step  by  step.    He  was  acting  —  it  kept 
coming  back  to  that  —  not  in  the  dark,  but  in  the  high 
golden  morning;  not  in  precipitation,  flurry,  fever, 
dangers  these  of  the  path  of  passion  properly  so  called, 
but  with  the  deliberation  of  a  plan,  a  plan  that  might 
be  a  thing  of  less  joy  than  a  passion,  but  that  probably 
would,  in  compensation  for  that  loss,  be  found  to  have 
the  essential  property,  to  wear  even  the  decent  dignity, 
of  reaching  further  and  of  providing  for  more  con 
tingencies.  The  season  was,  in  local  parlance,  "on," 
the  elements  were  assembled ;  the  big  windy  hotel,  the 
draughty  social  hall,  swarmed  with  "types,"  in  Char 
lotte's  constant  phrase,  and  resounded  with  a  din  in 
which  the  wild  music  of  gilded  and  befrogged  bands, 
Croatian,  Dalmatian,  Carpathian,  violently  exotic  and 
nostalgic,  was  distinguished  as  struggling  against  the 
perpetual  popping  of  corks.   Much  of  this  would  de 
cidedly  have  disconcerted  our  friends  if  it  had  n't  all 
happened,  more   preponderantly,  to  give   them   the 
brighter  surprise.    The  noble  privacy  of  Fawns  had 
left  them  —  had  left  Mr.  Verver  at  least  — with  a  little 
accumulated  sum  of  tolerance  to  spend  on  the  high 
pitch  and  high  colour  of  the  public  sphere.    Fawns, 
as  it  had  been  for  him,  and  as  Maggie  and  Fanny 
Assingham  had  both  attested,  was  out  of  the  world, 
whereas  the  scene  actually  about  him,  with  the  very 
sea  a  mere  big  booming  medium  for  excursions  and 
aquariums,  affected  him  as  so  plump  in  the  conscious 
centre  that  nothing  could  have  been  more  complete 
for  representing  that  pulse  of  life  which  they  had  come 
to  unanimity  at  home  on  the  subject  of  their  advisedly 

211 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

not  hereafter  forgetting.  The  pulse  of  life  was  what 
Charlotte,  in  her  way,  at  home,  had  lately  repro 
duced,  and  there  were  positively  current  hours  when 
it  might  have  been  open  to  her  companion  to  feel  him 
self  again  indebted  to  her  for  introductions.  He  had 
"brought"  her,  to  put  it  crudely,  but  it  was  almost 
as  if  she  were  herself,  in  her  greater  gaiety,  her  livelier 
curiosity  and  intensity,  her  readier,  happier  irony, 
taking  him  about  and  showing  him  the  place.  No  one, 
really,  when  he  came  to  think,  had  ever  taken  him 
about  before  —  it  had  always  been  he,  of  old,  who 
took  others  and  who  in  particular  took  Maggie.  This 
quickly  fell  into  its  relation  with  him  as  part  of  an 
experience  —  marking  for  him  no  doubt  what  people 
call  considerately  a  time  of  life  ;•  a  new  and  pleasant 
order,  a  flattered  passive  state  that  might  become  — 
why  should  n't  it  ?  —  one  of  the  comforts  of  the  future. 
Mr.  Gutermann-Seuss  proved,  on  the  second  day  — 
our  friend  had  waited  till  then  —  a  remarkably  genial, 
a  positively  lustrous  young  man  occupying  a  small 
neat  house  in  a  quarter  of  the  place  remote  from  the 
front  and  living,  as  immediate  and  striking  signs  testi 
fied,  in  the  bosom  of  his  family.  Our  visitors  found 
themselves  introduced,  by  the  operation  of  close  con 
tiguity,  to  a  numerous  group  of  ladies  and  gentlemen 
older  and  younger,  and  of  children  larger  and  smaller, 
who  mostly  affected  them  as  scarce  less  anointed  for 
hospitality  and  who  produced  at  first  the  impression 
of  a  birthday  party,  or  some  anniversary  gregariously 
and  religiously  kept,  though  they  subsequently  fell 
into  their  places  as  members  of  one  quiet  domestic 
circle,  preponderantly  and  directly  indebted  for  their 

212 


THE   PRINCE 

being  in  fact  to  Mr.  Gutermann-Seuss.  To  the  casual 
eye  a  mere  smart  and  shining  youth  of  less  than  thirty 
summers,  faultlessly  appointed  in  every  particular, 
he  yet  stood  among  his  progeny  —  eleven  in  all,  as  he 
confessed  without  a  sigh,  eleven  little  brown  clear 
faces,  yet  with  such  impersonal  old  eyes  astride  of 
such  impersonal  old  noses  —  while  he  entertained  the 
great  American  collector  whom  he  had  so  long  hoped 
he  might  meet,  and  whose  charming  companion,  the 
handsome  frank  familiar  young  lady,  presumably 
Mrs.  Verver,  noticed  the  graduated  offspring,  noticed 
the  fat  ear-ringed  aunts  and  the  glossy  cockneyfied, 
familiar  uncles,  inimitable  of  accent  and  assumption, 
and  of  an  attitude  of  cruder  intention  than  that  of  the 
head  of  the  firm ;  noticed  the  place  in  short,  noticed 
the  treasure  produced,  noticed  everything,  as  from  the 
habit  of  a  person  finding  her  account  at  any  time, 
according  to  a  wisdom  well  learned  of  life,  in  almost 
any  "funny"  impression.  It  really  came  home  to  her 
friend  on  the  spot  that  this  free  range  of  observation 
in  her,  picking  out  the  frequent  funny  with  extraor 
dinary  promptness,  would  verily  henceforth  make  a 
different  thing  for  him  of  such  experiences,  of  the  cus 
tomary  hunt  for  the  possible  prize,  the  inquisitive 
play  of  his  accepted  monomania ;  which  different  thing 
would  probably  be  a  lighter  and  perhaps  thereby  a 
somewhat  more  boisterously  refreshing  form  of  sport. 
Such  omens  struck  one  as  vivid,  in  any  case,  when  Mr. 
Gutermann-Seuss,  with  a  sharpness  of  discrimination 
he  had  at  first  scarce  seemed  to  promise,  invited  his 
eminent  couple  into  another  room,  before  the  thresh 
old  of  which  the  rest  of  the  tribe,  unanimously  falter- 

213 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

ing,  dropped  out  of  the  scene.  The  treasure  itself  here, 
the  objects  on  behalf  of  which  Mr.  Verver's  interest 
had  been  booked,  established  quickly  enough  their 
claim  to  engage  the  latter's  attention ;  yet  at  what  point 
of  his  past  did  our  friend's  memory,  looking  back  and 
back,  catch  him,  in  any  such  place,  thinking  so  much 
less  of  wares  artfully  paraded  than  of  some  other  and 
quite  irrelevant  presence  ?  Such  places  were  n't 
strange  to  him  when  they  took  the  form  of  bourgeois 
back  parlours,  a  trifle  ominously  grey  and  grim  from 
their  north  light,  at  watering-places  prevailingly 
homes  of  humbug,  or  even  when  they  wore  some 
aspect  still  less,  if  not  perhaps  still  more,  insidious. 
He  had  been  everywhere,  pried  and  prowled  every 
where,  going,  on  occasion,  so  far  as  to  risk,  he  be 
lieved,  life,  health  and  the  very  bloom  of  honour;  but 
where,  while  precious  things,  extracted  one  by  one 
from  thrice-locked  yet  often  vulgar  drawers  and  soft 
satchels  of  old  oriental  silk,  were  impressively  ranged 
before  him,  had  he  till  now  let  himself,  in  conscious 
ness,  wander  like  one  of  the  vague  ? 

He  didn't  betray  it  —  ah  that  he  knew;  but  two 
recognitions  took  place  for  him  at  once,  and  one  of 
them  suffered  a  little  in  sweetness  by  the  confusion. 
Mr.  Gutermann-Seuss  had  truly,  for  the  crisis,  the 
putting  down  of  his  cards,  a  rare  manner;  he  was  per 
fect  master  of  what  not  to  say  to  such  a  personage  as 
Mr.  Verver  while  the  particular  importance  that  dis 
penses  with  chatter  was  diffused  by  his  movements 
themselves,  his  repeated  act  of  passage  between  a  feat 
ureless  mahogany  meuble  and  a  table  so  virtuously 
disinterested  as  to  look  fairly  smug  under  a  cotton 

214 


THE   PRINCE 

cloth  of  faded  maroon  and  indigo,  all  redolent  of  pa 
triarchal  teas.  The  Damascene  tiles,  successively  and 
oh  so  tenderly  unmuffled  and  revealed,  lay  there  at  last 
in  their  full  harmony  and  their  venerable  splendour, 
but  the  tribute  of  appreciation  and  decision  was,  while 
the  spectator  considered,  simplified  to  a  point  that  but 
just  failed  of  representing  levity  on  the  part  of  a  man 
who  had  always  acknowledged  without  shame  in  such 
affairs  the  intrinsic  charm  of  what  was  called  discus 
sion.  The  infinitely  ancient,  the  immemorial  amethyst 
ine  blue  of  the  glaze,  scarcely  more  meant  to  be 
breathed  upon,  it  would  seem,  than  the  cheek  of  roy 
alty  —  this  property  of  the  ordered  and  matched  array 
had  inevitably  all  its  determination  for  him ;  but  his 
submission  was,  perhaps  for  the  first  time  in  his  life, 
of  the  quick  mind  alone,  the  process  really  itself,  in  its 
way,  as  fine  as  the  perfection  perceived  and  admired : 
every  inch  of  the  rest  of  him  being  given  to  the  fore 
knowledge  that  an  hour  or  two  later  he  should  have 
"spoken."  The  burning  of  his  ships  therefore  waited 
too  near  to  let  him  handle  his  opportunity  with  his 
usual  firm  and  sentient  fingers  —  waited  somehow  in 
the  predominance  of  Charlotte's  very  person,  in  her 
being  there  exactly  as  she  was,  capable,  as  Mr.  Guter- 
mann-Seuss  himself  was  capable,  of  the  right  felicity 
of  silence,  but  with  an  embracing  ease,  through  it  all, 
that  made  deferred  criticism  as  fragrant  as  some  joy 
promised  a  lover  by  his  mistress,  or  as  a  big  bridal 
bouquet  held  patiently  behind  her.  He  could  n't 
otherwise  have  explained,  surely,  why  he  found  him 
self  thinking,  to  his  enjoyment,  of  so  many  other  mat 
ters  than  the  felicity  of  his  acquisition  and  the  figure 

215 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

of  his  cheque,  quite  equally  high ;  any  more  than  why, 
later  on,  with  their  return  to  the  room  in  which  they 
had  been  received  and  the  renewed  encompassment 
of  the  tribe,  he  felt  quite  merged  in  the  elated  circle 
formed  by  the  girl's  free  response  to  the  collective 
caress  of  all  the  shining  eyes,  and  by  her  genial  accept 
ance  of  the  heavy  cake  and  port  wine  that,  as  she 
was  afterwards  to  note,  added  to  their  transaction, 
for  a  finish,  the  touch  of  some  mystic  rite  of  old 
Jewry. 

This  characterisation  came  from  her  as  they  walked 
away  —  walked  together,  in  the  waning  afternoon, 
back  to  the  breezy  sea  and  the  bustling  front,  back  to 
the  rumble  and  the  flutter  and  the  shining  shops  that 
sharpened  the  grin  of  solicitation  on  the  mask  of  night. 
They  were  walking  thus,  as  he  felt,  nearer  and  nearer 
to  where  he  should  see  his  ships  burn,  and  it  was  mean 
while  for  him  quite  as  if  this  red  glow  would  impart, 
at  the  harmonious  hour,  a  lurid  grandeur  to  his 
good  faith.  It  was  meanwhile  too  a  sign  of  the  kind  of 
sensibility  often  playing  up  in  him  that  —  fabulous  as 
this  truth  may  sound  —  he  found  a  sentimental  link, 
an  obligation  of  delicacy,  or  perhaps  even  one  of  the 
penalties  of  its  opposite,  in  his  having  exposed  her  to 
the  north  light,  the  quite  properly  hard  business-light, 
of  the  room  in  which  they  had  been  alone  with  the 
treasure  and  its  master.  She  had  listened  to  the  nam< 
of  the  sum  he  was  capable  of  looking  in  the  face. 
Given  the  relation  of  intimacy  with  him  she  had 
already  beyond  all  retractation  accepted,  the  stir  of  the 
air  produced  at  the  other  place  by  that  high  figure 
struck  him  as  a  thing  that,  from  the  moment  she  had 

216 


THE  PRINCE 

exclaimed  or  protested  as  little  as  he  himself  had  apo 
logised,  left  him  but  one  thing  more  to  do.  A  man  of 
decent  feeling  did  n't  thrust  his  money,  a  huge  lump 
of  it,  in  such  a  way,  under  a  poor  girl's  nose  —  a  girl 
whose  poverty  was,  after  a  fashion,  the  very  basis  of 
her  enjoyment  of  his  hospitality  —  without  seeing, 
logically,  a  responsibility  attached.  And  this  was  to 
remain  none  the  less  true  for  the  fact  that  twenty 
minutes  later,  after  he  had  applied  his  torch,  applied 
it  with  a  sign  or  two  of  insistence,  what  might  definitely 
result  failed  to  be  immediately  clear.  He  had  spoken 
—  spoken  as  they  sat  together  on  the  out-of-the-way 
bench  observed  during  one  of  their  walks  and. kept  for 
the  previous  quarter  of  the  present  hour  well  in  his 
memory's  eye;  the  particular  spot  to  which,  between 
intense  pauses  and  intenser  advances,  he  had  all  the 
while  consistently  led  her.  Below  the  great  consoli 
dated  cliff,  well  on  to  where  the  city  of  stucco  sat  most 
architecturally  perched,  with  the  rumbling  beach  and 
the  rising  tide  and  the  freshening  stars  in  front  and 
above,  the  safe  sense  of  the  whole  place  yet  prevailed 
in  lamps  and  seats  and  flagged  walks,  hovering  also 
overhead  in  the  close  neighbourhood  of  a  great  replete 
community  about  to  assist  anew  at  the  removal  of 
dish-covers. 

"We  Ve  had,  as  it  seems  to  me,  such  quite  beautiful 
days  together  that  I  hope  it  won't  come  to  you  too 
much  as  a  shock  when  I  ask  if  you  think  you  could 
regard  me  with  any  satisfaction  as  a  husband."  As  if 
he  had  known  she  would  n't,  she  of  course  could  n't 
at  all  gracefully  and  whether  or  no,  reply  with  a  rush, 
he  had  said  a  little  more  —  quite  as  he  had  felt  he 

217 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

must  in  thinking  it  out  in  advance.  He  had  put  the 
question  on  which  there  was  no  going  back  and  which 
represented  thereby  the  sacrifice  of  his  vessels,  and 
what  he  further  said  was  to  stand  for  the  redoubled 
thrust  of  flame  that  would  make  combustion  sure. 
"This  is  n't  sudden  to  me,  and  I  've  wondered  at  mo 
ments  if  you  have  n't  felt  me  coming  to  it.  I  've  been 
coming  ever  since  we  left  Fawns  —  I  really  started 
while  we  were  there."  He  spoke  slowly,  giving  her,  as 
he  desired,  time  to  think ;  all  the  more  that  it  was  mak 
ing  her  look  at  him  steadily,  and  making  her  also,  in  a 
remarkable  degree,  look  "well "  while  she  did  so  —  a 
large  and  so  far  a  happy  consequence.  She  was  n't  at 
all  events  shocked  —  which  he  had  glanced  at  but  for 
a  handsome  humility  —  and  he  would  give  her  as 
many  minutes  as  she  liked.  "You  must  n't  think  I  'm 
forgetting  that  I  'm  not  young." 

"Oh  that  isn't  so.  It's  I  who  am  old.  You  are 
young."  This  was  what  she  had  at  first  answered  — 
and  quite  in  the  tone  too  of  having  taken  her  minutes. 
It  had  n't  been  wholly  to  the  point,  but  it  had  been 
kind  —  which  was  what  he  most  wanted.  And  she 
kept,  for  her  next  words,  to  kindness,  kept  to  her  clear 
lowered  voice  and  unshrinking  face.  "To  me  too  it 
thoroughly  seems  that  these  days  have  been  beautiful. 
I  should  n't  be  grateful  to  them  if  I  could  n't  more  or 
less  have  imagined  their  bringing  us  to  this."  She 
affected  him  somehow  as  if  she  had  advanced  a  step 
to  meet  him  and  yet  were  at  the  same  time  standing 
still.  It  only  meant,  however,  doubtless,  that  she  was 
gravely  and  reasonably  thinking  —  as  he  exactly  de 
sired  to  make  her.  If  she  would  but  think  enough  she 

218 


THE   PRINCE 

would  probably  think  to  suit  him.   "It  seems  to  me," 
she  went  on,  "that  it's  for  you  to  be  sure." 

"Ah  but  I  am  sure,"  said  Adam  Verver.  "On  mat 
ters  of  importance  I  never  speak  when  I  'm  not.  So  if 
you  can  yourself  face  such  a  union  you  need  n't  in  the 
least  trouble." 

She  had  another  pause,  and  she  might  have  been 
felt  as  facing  it  while,  through  lamplight  and  dusk, 
through  the  breath  of  the  mild  slightly  damp  south 
west,  she  met  his  eyes  without  evasion.  Yet  she  had 
at  the  end  of  another  minute  debated  only  to  the  ex 
tent  of  saying :  "  I  won't  pretend  I  don't  think  it  would 
be  good  for  me  to  marry.  Good  for  me,  I  mean,"  she 
pursued,  "because  I'm  so  awfully  unattached.  I 
should  like  to  be  a  little  less  adrift.  I  should  like  to 
have  a  home.  I  should  like  to  have  an  existence.  I 
should  like  to  have  a  motive  for  one  thing  more  than 
another  —  a  motive  outside  of  myself.  In  fact,"  she 
said,  so  sincerely  that  it  almost  showed  pain,  yet  so 
lucidly  that  it  almost  showed  humour,  "in  fact,  you 
know,  I  want  to  be  married.  It's — well,  it's  the  con 
dition." 

"The  condition  —  ?"   He  was  just  vague. 

"It's  the  state,  I  mean.  I  don't  like  my  own. 
'  Miss,'  among  us  all,  is  too  dreadful  —  except  for  a 
shopgirl.  I  don't  want  to  be  a  horrible  English  old- 
maid." 

"Oh  you  want  to  be  taken  care  of.  Very  well  then 
I  '11  do  it." 

"I  dare  say  it's  very  much  that.  Only  I  don't  see 
why,  for  what  I  speak  of,"  she  smiled  —  "for  a  mere 
escape  from  my  state  —  I  need  do  quite  so  much" 

219 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"So  much  as  marry  me  in  particular?" 

Her  smile  was  as  for  true  directness.  "  I  might  get 
what  I  want  for  less." 

"You  think  it's  so  much  for  you  to  do  ?" 

"Yes,"  she  presently  said,  "I  think  it's  a  great 
deal." 

Then  it  was  that,  though  she  was  so  gentle,  so  quite 
perfect  with  him,  and  he  felt  he  had  come  on  far  — 
then  it  was  that  of  a  sudden  something  seemed  to  fail 
and  he  did  n't  quite  know  where  they  were.  There 
rose  for  him  with  this  the  fact,  to  be  sure,  of  their  dis 
parity,  ignore  it  as  mercifully  and  perversely  as  she 
would.  He  might  have  been  her  father.  "Of  course, 
yes  —  that 's  my  disadvantage :  I  'm  not  the  natural, 
I  *m  so  far  from  being  the  ideal,  match  to  your  youth 
and  your  beauty.  I've  the  drawback  that  you've 
seen  me  always,  and  so  inevitably,  in  such  another 
light." 

But  she  gave  a  slow  headshake  that  made  contra 
diction  soft  — jnade  it  almost  sad,  in  fact,  as  from 
having  to  be  so  complete ;  and  he  had  already,  before 
she  spoke,  the  dim  vision  of  some  objection  in  her 
mind  beside  which  the  one  he  had  named  was  light, 
and  which  therefore  must  be  strangely  deep.  "You 
don't  understand  me.  It 's  of  all  that  it  is  for  you  to 
do  —  it's  of  that  I  'm  thinking." 

Oh  with  this  for  him  the  thing  was  clearer!  "Then 
you  need  n't  think.  I  know  enough  what  it  is  for  me 
to  do." 

But  she  shook  her  head  again.  "  I  doubt  if  you 
know.  I  doubt  if  you  can" 

"And  why  not,  please  —  when  I've  had  you  so 

220 


THE  PRINCE 

before  me  ?  That  I  'm  old  has  at  least  that  fact  about 
it  to  the  good  —  that  I  Ve  known  you  long  and  from 
far  back." 

"  Do  you  think  you  Ve  '  known '  me  ? "  asked  Char 
lotte  Stant. 

He  debated  —  for  the  tone  of  it,  and  her  look  with 
it  might  have  made  him  doubt.  Just  these  things  in 
themselves,  however,  with  all  the  rest,  with  his  fixed 
purpose  now,  his  committed  deed,  the  fine  pink  glow, 
projected  forward,  of  his  ships,  behind  him,  definitely 
blazing  and  crackling  —  this  quantity  was  to  push  him 
harder  than  any  word  of  her  own  could  warn  him.  All 
that  she  was  herself,  moreover,  was  so  lighted,  to  its 
advantage,  by  the  pink  glow.  He  was  n't  rabid,  but 
he  was  n't  either,  as  a  man  of  a  proper  spirit,  to  be 
frightened.  "  What  is  that  then  —  if  I  accept  it  —  but 
as  strong  a  reason  as  I  can  want  for  just  learning  to 
know  you  ? " 

She  faced  him  always  —  kept  it  up  as  for  honesty, 
and  yet  at  the  same  time,  in  her  odd  way,  as  for  mercy. 
"  How  can  you  tell  whether  if  you  did  you  would  ? " 
It  was  ambiguous  for  an  instant,  as  she  showed  she 
felt.  "I  mean  when  it's  a  question  of  learning  one 
learns  sometimes  too  late." 

"  I  think  it 's  a  question,"  he  promptly  enough  made 
answer,  "of  liking  you  the  more  just  for  your  saying 
these  things.  You  should  make  something,"  he  added, 
"of  my  liking  you." 

"I  make  everything.  But  are  you  sure  of  having 
exhausted  all  other  ways  ? " 

This  of  a  truth  enlarged  his  gaze.  "  But  what  other 
ways  —  ? " 

221 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"Why  you've  more  ways  of  being  kind  than  any 
one  I  ever  knew." 

"Take  it  then,"  he  answered,  "that  I  'm  simply  put 
ting  them  all  together  for  you."  She  looked  at  him, 
on  this,  long  again  —  still  as  if  it  should  n't  be  said 
she  had  n't  given  him  time  or  had  withdrawn  from 
his  view,  so  to  speak,  a  single  inch  of  her  surface. 
This  at  least  she  was  fully  to  have  exposed.  It  re 
presented  her  as  oddly  conscientious,  and  he  scarce 
knew  in  what  sense  it  affected  him.  On  the  whole, 
however,  with  admiration.  "You're  very,  very  hon 
ourable." 

"It's  just  what  I  want  to  be.  I  don't  see,"  she 
added,  "why  you  're  not  right,  I  don't  see  why  you  're 
not  happy,  as  you  are.  I  can't  not  ask  myself,  I  can't 
not  ask  you"  she  went  on,  "if  you're  really  as  much 
at  liberty  as  your  universal  generosity  leads  you  to 
assume.  Oughtn't  we,"  she  said,  "to  think  a  little 
of  others  ?  Ought  n't  I  at  least  in  loyalty  —  at  any 
rate  in  delicacy  —  to  think  of  Maggie  ? "  With  which, 
intensely  gentle,  so  as  not  to  appear  too  much  to  teach 
him  his  duty,  she  explained.  "She's  everything  to 
you  —  she  has  always  been.  Are  you  so  certain  that 
there 's  room  in  your  life  —  ? " 

"For  another  daughter  ? — is  that  what  you  mean  ?" 
She  had  n't  hung  upon  it  long,  but  he  had  quickly 
taken  her  up. 

He  had  n't,  however,  disconcerted  her.  "  For  an 
other  young  woman  —  very  much  of  her  age,  and 
whose  relation  to  her  has  always  been  so  different  from 
what  our  marrying  would  make  it.  For  another  com 
panion,"  said  Charlotte  Stant. 

"Can't  a  man  be,  all  his  life  then,"  he  almost 

222 


THE  PRINCE 

fiercely  asked,  "anything  but  a  father  ? "  But  he  went 
on  before  she  could  answer.  "You  talk  about  differ 
ences,  but  they  've  been  already  made  —  as  no  one 
knows  better  than  Maggie.  She  feels  the  one  she  made 
herself  by  her  own  marriage  —  made  I  mean  for  me. 
She  constantly  thinks  of  it  —  it  allows  her  no  rest.  To 
put  her  at  peace  is  therefore,"  he  explained,  "what  I  'm 
trying,  with  you,  to  do.  I  can't  do  it  alone,  but  I  can 
do  it  with  your  help.  You  can  make  her,"  he  said, 
"positively  happy  about  me." 

"About  you  ? "  she  thoughtfully  echoed.  "  But  what 
can  I  make  her  about  herself?" 

"Oh  if  she's  at  ease  about  me  the  rest  will  take 
care  of  itself.  The  case,"  he  declared,  "is  in  your 
hands.  You  '11  effectually  put  out  of  her  mind  that  I 
feel  she  has  abandoned  me." 

Interest  certainly  now  was  what  he  had  kindled  in 
her  face,  but  it  was  all  the  more  honourable  to  her,  as 
he  had  just  called  it,  that  she  should  want  to  see  each 
of  the  steps  of  his  conviction.  "  If  you  Ve  been  driven 
to  the  '  likes '  of  me  may  n't  it  show  that  you  've  truly 
felt  forsaken  ? " 

"Well,  I  'm  willing  to  suggest  that,  if  I  can  show  at 
the  same  time  that  I  feel  consoled." 

"But  have  you,"  she  demanded,  "really  felt  so?" 

He  thought.   "Consoled?" 

"Forsaken." 

"  No  —  I  have  n't.  But  if  it 's  her  idea  — ! "  If  it 
was  her  idea,  in  short,  that  was  enough.  This  enunci 
ation  of  motive  the  next  moment  however  sounded  to 
him  perhaps  slightly  thin,  so  that  he  gave  it  another 
touch.  "That  is  if  it's  my  idea.  I  happen,  you  see,  to 
like  my  idea." 

223 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"Well,  it's  beautiful  and  wonderful.  But  is  n't  it, 
possibly,"  Charlotte  asked,  "not  quite  enough  to 
marry  me  for  ? " 

"Why  so,  my  dear  child  ?  Is  n't  a  man's  idea  usu 
ally  what  he  does  marry  for?" 

Charlotte,  considering,  looked  as  if  this  might  per 
haps  be  a  large  question,  or  at  all  events  something  of 
an  extension  of  the  one  they  were  immediately  con 
cerned  with.  "  Does  n't  that  a  good  deal  depend  on 
the  sort  of  thing  it  may  be?"  She  suggested  that 
about  marriage  ideas,  as  he  called  them,  might  dif 
fer;  with  which  however,  giving  no  more  time  to  it,  she 
sounded  another  question.  "  Don't  you  appear  rather 
to  put  it  to  me  that  I  may  accept  your  offer  for 
Maggie's  sake  ?  Somehow  "  —  she  turned  it  over  — 
"  I  don't  so  clearly  see  her  quite  so  much  finding  reas 
surance,  or  even  quite  so  much  needing  it." 

"  Do  you  then  make  nothing  at  all  of  her  having 
been  so  ready  to  leave  us  ? " 

Ah  Charlotte  on  the  contrary  made  much!  "She 
was  ready  to  leave  us  because  she  had  to  be.  From 
the  moment  the  Prince  wanted  it  she  could  only  go 
with  him." 

"  Perfectly  —  so  that  if  you  see  your  way  she  '11  be 
able  to  'go  with  him '  in  future  as  much  as  she  likes." 

Charlotte  appeared  to  examine  for  a  minute,  in 
Maggie's  interest,  this  privilege  —  the  result  of  which 
was  a  limited  concession.  "You've  certainly  worked 
it  out!" 

"Of  course  I've  worked  it  out  —  that's  exactly 
what  I  have  done.  She  had  n't  for  a  long  time  been  so 
happy  about  anything  as  at  your  being  there  with  me." 

224 


THE   PRINCE 

"I  was  to  be  with  you,"  said  Charlotte,  "for  her 
security." 

"Well,"  Adam  Verver  rang  out,  "this  is  her 
security.  You  've  only,  if  you  can't  see  it,  to  ask  her." 

"'Ask'  her?"  —  the  girl  echoed  it  in  wonder. 

"  Certainly  —  in  so  many  words.  Telling  her  you 
don't  believe  me." 

Still  she  debated.  "Do  you  mean  write  it  to 
her?" 

"Quite  so.   Immediately.   To-morrow." 

"Oh  I  don't  think  I  can  write  it,"  said  Charlotte 
Stant.  "  When  I  write  to  her "  —  and  she  looked 
amused  for  so  different  a  shade  —  "  it 's  about  the 
Principino's  appetite  and  Dr.  Brady's  visits." 

"  Very  good  then  —  put  it  to  her  face  to  face.  We  '11 
go  straight  to  Paris  to  meet  them." 

Charlotte,  at  this,  rose  with  a  movement  that  was 
like  a  small  cry;  but  her  unspoken  sense  lost  itself 
while  she  stood  with  her  eyes  on  him  —  he  keeping  his 
seat  as  for  the  help  it  gave  him,  a  little,  to  make  his 
appeal  go  up.  Presently,  however,  a  new  sense  had 
come  to  her,  and  she  covered  him  kindly  with  the 
expression  of  it.  "I  do  think,  you  know,  you  must 
rather  'like'  me." 

"Thank  you,"  said  Adam  Verver.  "You  will  put 
it  to  her  yourself  then  ? " 

She  had  another  hesitation.  "We  go  over  you  say 
to  meet  them  ? " 

"As  soon  as  we  can  get  back  to  Fawns.  And  wait 
there  for  them,  if  necessary,  till  they  come." 

"  Wait  —  a  —  at  Fawns  ? " 

"Wait  in  Paris.  That  will  be  charming  in  itself." 
225 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"You  take  me  to  pleasant  places."  She  turned  it 
over.  "You  propose  to  me  beautiful  things." 

"  It  rests  but  with  you  to  make  them  beautiful  and 
pleasant.  You  've  made  Brighton  — ! " 

"Ah!"  —  she  almost  tenderly  protested.  "With 
what  I  'm  doing  now  ? " 

"You're  promising  me  now  what  I  want.  Are  n't 
you  promising  me,"  he  pressed,  getting  up,  "  are  n't 
you  promising  me  to  abide  by  what  Maggie  says  ? " 

Oh  she  wanted  to  be  sure  she  was.  "  Do  you  mean 
she  '11  ask  it  of  me  ? " 

It  gave  him  indeed,  as  by  communication,  a  sense  of 
the  propriety  of  being  himself  certain.  Yet  what  was 
he  but  certain  ?  "  She  '11  speak  to  you.  She  '11  speak  to 
you  for  me." 

This  at  last  then  seemed  to  satisfy  her.  "Very  good. 
May  we  wait  again  to  talk  of  it  till  she  has  done  so  ? " 

He  showed,  with  his  hands  down  in  his  pockets  and 
his  shoulders  expressively  up,  a  certain  disappoint 
ment.  Soon  enough,  none  the  less,  his  gentleness  was 
all  back  and  his  patience  once  more  exemplary.  "Of 
course  I  give  you  time.  Especially,"  he  smiled,  "  as  it 's 
time  that  I  shall  be  spending  with  you.  Our  keeping 
on  together  will  help  you  perhaps  to  see.  To  see  I 
mean  how  I  need  you." 

"I  already  see,"  said  Charlotte,  "how  you've  per 
suaded  yourself  you  do."  But  she  had  to  repeat  it. 
"That  isn't  unfortunately  all." 

"Well  then  how  you'll  make  Maggie  right." 

"  *  Right '  ? "  She  echoed  it  as  if  the  word  went  far. 
And  "  O-oh ! "  she  still  critically  murmured  as  they 
moved  together  away. 

226 


VII 


HE  had  talked  to  her  of  their  waiting  in  Paris  a  week 
later,  but  on  the  spot  there  this  period  of  patience 
suffered  no  great  strain.  He  had  written  to  his  daugh 
ter,  not  indeed  from  Brighton,  but  directly  after  their 
return  to  Fawns,  where  they  spent  only  forty-eight 
hours  before  resuming  their  journey;  and  Maggie's 
reply  to  his  news  was  a  telegram  from  Rome,  deliv 
ered  to  him  at  noon  of  their  fourth  day  and  which 
he  brought  out  to  Charlotte,  who  was  seated  at  that 
moment  in  the  court  of  the  hotel,  where  they  had 
agreed  he  should  join  her  for  their  proceeding  to 
gether  to  the  noontide  meal.  His  letter,  at  Fawns  - — 
a  letter  of  several  pages  and  intended  lucidly, 
unreservedly,  in  fact  all  but  triumphantly,  to  inform 
—  had  proved  on  his  sitting  down  to  it  and  a  little  to 
his  surprise  not  quite  so  simple  a  document  to  frame 
as  even  his  due  consciousness  of  its  weight  of  meaning 
had  allowed  him  to  assume :  this  doubtless  however 
only  for  reasons  naturally  latent  in  the  very  wealth  of 
that  consciousness,  which  contributed  to  his  message 
something  of  their  own  quality  of  impatience.  The 
main  result  of  their  talk  for  the  time  had  been  a  dif 
ference  in  his  relation  to  his  young  friend,  as  well  as 
a  difference,  equally  sensible,  in  her  relation  to  him 
self;  and  this  in  spite  of  his  not  having  again  renewed 
his  undertaking  to  "speak"  to  her  so  far  even  as  to 
tell  her  of  the  communication  dispatched  to  Rome. 

227 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

Delicacy,  a  delicacy  more  beautiful  still,  all  the  deli 
cacy  she  should  want,  reigned  between  them  —  it 
being  rudimentary,  in  their  actual  order,  that  she 
must  n't  be  further  worried  until  Maggie  should  have 
put  her  at  her  ease. 

It  was  just  the  delicacy,  nevertheless,  that  in  Paris 
—  which,  suggestively,  was  Brighton  at  a  hundred 
fold  higher  pitch  —  made  between  him  and  his  asso 
ciate  the  tension,  made  the  suspense,  made  what  he 
would  have  consented  perhaps  to  call  the  provisional 
peculiarity,  of  present  conditions.  These  elements 
acted  in  a  manner  of  their  own,  imposing  and  involv 
ing,  under  one  head,  many  abstentions  and  precau 
tions,  twenty  anxieties  and  reminders  —  things  verily 
he  would  scarce  have  known  how  to  express;  and  yet 
creating  for  them  at  every  step  an  acceptance  of  their 
reality.  He  was  hanging  back  with  Charlotte  till 
another  person  should  intervene  for  their  assistance, 
and  yet  they  had,  by  what  had  already  occurred,  been 
carried  on  to  something  it  was  out  of  the  power  of 
other  persons  to  make  either  less  or  greater.  Common 
conventions  —  that  was  what  was  odd  —  had  to  be  on 
this  basis  more  thought  of;  those  common  conventions 
that,  previous  to  the  passage  by  the  Brighton  strand, 
he  had  so  enjoyed  the  sense  of  their  overlooking. 
The  explanation  would  have  been,  he  supposed  —  or 
would  have  figured  it  with  less  of  unrest  —  that  Paris 
had,  in  its  way,  deeper  voices  and  warnings,  so  that 
if  you  went  at  all  "far"  there  it  laid  bristling  traps, 
as  they  might  have  been  viewed,  all  smothered  in 
flowers,  for  your  going  further  still.  There  were 
strange  appearances  in  the  air,  and  before  you  knew 

228 


it  you  might  be  unmistakeably  matching  them.  Since 
he  wished  therefore  to  match  no  appearance  but  that 
of  a  gentleman  playing  with  perfect  fairness  any  game 
in  life  he  might  be  called  to,  he  found  himself  on  the 
receipt  of  Maggie's  missive  rejoicing  with  a  certain 
inconsistency.  The  announcement  made  her  from 
home  had,  in  the  act,  cost  some  biting  of  his  pen  to 
sundry  parts  of  him  —  his  personal  modesty,  his  im 
agination  of  her  prepared  state  for  so  quick  a  jump, 
it  did  n't  much  matter  which  —  and  yet  he  was  more 
eager  than  not  for  the  drop  of  delay  and  for  the 
quicker  transitions  promised  by  the  arrival  of  the  im 
minent  pair.  There  was  after  all  a  hint  of  offence  to 
a  man  of  his  age  in  being  taken,  as  they  said  at  the 
shops,  on  approval.  Maggie  certainly  would  have 
been  as  far  as  Charlotte  herself  from  positively  desir 
ing  this,  and  Charlotte  on  her  side  as  far  as  Maggie 
from  holding  him  light  as  a  real  value.  She  made  him 
fidget  thus,  poor  girl,  but  from  generous  rigour  of 
conscience. 

These  allowances  of  his  spirit  were  all  the  same 
consistent  with  a  great  gladness  at  the  sight  of  the 
term  of  his  ordeal ;  for  it  was  the  end  of  his  seeming 
to  agree  that  questions  and  doubts  had  a  place.  The 
more  he  had  inwardly  turned  the  matter  over  the 
more  it  had  struck  him  that  they  had  in  truth  only  an 
ugliness.  What  he  could  have  best  borne,  as  he  now 
believed,  would  have  been  Charlotte's  simply  saying 
to  him  that  she  did  n't  like  him  enough.  This  he 
would  n't  have  enjoyed,  but  he  would  quite  have 
understood  it  and  been  able  ruefully  to  submit.  She 
did  like  him  enough  —  nothing  to  contradict  that  had 

229 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

come  out  for  him;  so  that  he  was  restless  for  her  as 
well  as  for  himself.  She  looked  at  him  hard  a  mo 
ment  when  he  handed  her  his  telegram,  and  the  look, 
for  what  he  fancied  a  dim  shy  fear  in  it,  gave  him 
perhaps  his  best  moment  of  conviction  that  —  as  a 
man,  so  to  speak  —  he  properly  pleased  her.  He  said 
nothing  —  the  words  sufficiently  did  it  for  him,  doing 
it  again  better  still  as  Charlotte,  who  had  left  her 
chair  at  his  approach,  murmured  them  out.  "We 
start  to-night  to  bring  you  all  our  love  and  joy  and 
sympathy."  There  they  were,  the  words,  and  what 
did  she  want  more  ?  She  did  n't  however  as  she  gave 
him  back  the  little  unfolded  leaf  say  they  were  enough 
—  though  he  saw  the  next  moment  that  her  silence 
was  probably  not  disconnected  from  her  having  just 
visibly  turned  pale.  Her  extraordinarily  fine  eyes,  as 
it  was  his  present  theory  that  he  had  always  thought 
them,  shone  at  him  the  more  darkly  out  of  this  change 
of  colour;  and  she  had  again  with  it  her  apparent  way 
of  subjecting  herself,  for  explicit  honesty  and  through 
her  willingness  to  face  him,  to  any  view  he  might  take, 
all  at  his  ease,  and  even  to  wantonness,  of  the  condi 
tion  he  produced  in  her.  As  soon  as  he  saw  how 
emotion  kept  her  soundless  he  knew  himself  deeply 
touched,  since  it  proved  that,  little  as  she  professed, 
she  had  been  beautifully  hoping.  They  stood  there  a 
minute  while  he  took  in  from  this  sign  that,  yes  then, 
certainly  she  liked  him  enough  —  liked  him  enough 
to  make  him,  old  as  he  was  ready  to  brand  himself, 
flush  for  the  pleasure  of  it.  The  pleasure  of  it  accord 
ingly  made  him  speak  first.  "  Do  you  begin  a  little  to 
be  satisfied  ? " 

230 


THE  PRINCE 

Still,  oh  still  a  little,  she  had  to  think.  "We've 
hurried  them  you  see.  Why  so  breathless  a  start  ? " 

"Because  they  want  to  congratulate  us.  They 
want,"  said  Adam  Verver,  "to  see  our  happiness." 

She  wondered  again  —  and  this  time  also,  for  him, 
as  publicly  as  possible.  "So  much  as  that?" 

"  Do  you  think  it 's  too  much  ? " 

She  continued  to  think  plainly.  "They  were  n't  to 
have  started  for  another  week." 

"Well,  what  then  ?  Isn't  our  situation  worth  the 
little  sacrifice  ?  We  '11  go  back  to  Rome  as  soon  as  you 
like  with  them." 

This  seemed  to  hold  her  —  as  he  had  previously 
seen  her  held,  just  a  trifle  inscrutably,  by  his  allusions 
to  what  they  would  do  together  on  a  certain  contin 
gency.  "Worth  it,  the  little  sacrifice,  for  whom  ?  For 
us,  naturally  —  yes,"  she  said.  "We  want  to  see  them 
—  for  our  reasons.  That  is,"  she  rather  dimly 
smiled,  "you  do." 

"And  you  do,  my  dear,  too!"  he  bravely  declared. 

"Yes  then  —  I  do  too,"  she  after  an  instant  un 
grudgingly  enough  acknowledged.  "For  us,  however, 
something  depends  on  it." 

"Rather!  But  does  nothing  depend  on  it  for 
them?" 

"What  can  —  from  the  moment  that,  as  appears, 
they  don't  want  to  nip  us  in  the  bud  ?  I  can  imagine 
their  rushing  up  to  prevent  us.  But  an  enthusiasm 
for  us  that  can  wait  so  very  little  —  such  intense  eager 
ness,  I  confess,"  she  went  on,  "more  than  a  little 
puzzles  me.  You  may  think  me,"  she  also  added, 
"ungracious  and  suspicious,  but  the  Prince  can't  at 

23 I 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

all  want  to  come  back  so  soon.  He  wanted  quite  too 
intensely  to  get  away.*' 

Mr.  Verver  considered.  "Well,  has  n't  he  been 
away  ? " 

"  Yes,  just  long  enough  to  see  how  he  likes  it.  Be 
sides,"  said  Charlotte,  "he  may  n't  be  able  to  join  in 
the  rosy  view  of  our  case  that  you  impute  to  Maggie. 
It  can't  in  the  least  have  appeared  to  him  hitherto 
a  matter  of  course  that  you  should  give  his  wife  a 
bouncing  stepmother." 

Adam  Verver  at  this  looked  grave.  "  I  'm  afraid 
then  he'll  just  have  to  accept  from  us  whatever  his 
wife  accepts ;  and  accept  it  —  if  he  can  imagine  no 
better  reason  —  just  because  she  does.  That,"  he 
declared,  "will  have  to  do  for  him." 

His  tone  made  her  for  a  moment  meet  his  face; 
after  which,  "Let  me,"  she  abruptly  said,  "see  it 
again  "  —  taking  from  him  the  folded  leaf  that  she 
had  given  back  and  he  had  kept  in  his  hand.  "Is  n't 
the  whole  thing,"  she  asked  when  she  had  read  it  overj 
"perhaps  but  a  way  like  another  for  their  gaining 
time?" 

He  again  stood  staring;  but  the  next  minute,  with 
that  upward  spring  of  his  shoulders  and  that  down 
ward  pressure  of  his  pockets  which  she  had  already 
more  than  once  at  disconcerted  moments  determined 
in  him,  he  turned  sharply  away  and  wandered  from 
her  in  silence.  He  looked  about  in  his  small  despair; 
he  crossed  the  hotel  court,  which,  overarched  and 
glazed,  muffled  against  loud  sounds  and  guarded 
against  crude  sights,  heated,  gilded,  draped,  almost 
carpeted,  with  exotic  trees  in  tubs,  exotic  ladies  in 

232 


THE   PRINCE 

chairs,  the  general  exotic  accent  and  presence  sus 
pended,  as  with  wings  folded  or  feebly  fluttering,  in 
the  superior,  the  supreme,  the  inexorably  enveloping 
Parisian  medium,  resembled  some  critical  apartment 
of  large  capacity,  some  "dental,"  medical,  surgical 
waiting-room,  a  scene  of  mixed  anxiety  and  desire, 
preparatory,  for  gathered  barbarians,  to  the  due 
amputation  or  extraction  of  excrescences  and  redun 
dancies  of  barbarism.  He  went  as  far  as  the  porte- 
cochere,  took  counsel  afresh  of  his  usual  optimism, 
sharpened  even  somehow  just  here  by  the  very  air  he 
tasted,  and  then  came  back  smiling  to  Charlotte. 
"It's  incredible  to  you  that  when  a  man  is  still  as 
much  in  love  as  Amerigo  his  most  natural  impulse 
should  be  to  feel  what  his  wife  feels,  to  believe  what 
she  believes,  to  want  what  she  wants  ?  —  in  the  ab 
sence,  that  is,  of  special  impediments  to  his  so  doing." 

The  manner  of  it  operated  —  she  acknowledged 
with  no  great  delay  this  natural  possibility.  "  No  — 
nothing  is  incredible  to  me  of  people  immensely  in 
love." 

"  Well,  is  n't  Amerigo  immensely  in  love  ? " 

She  hesitated  but  as  for  the  right  expression  of  her 
sense  of  the  degree  —  but  she  after  all  adopted  Mr. 
Verver's.  "  Immensely." 

"Then  there  you  are!" 

She  had  another  smile,  however  —  she  was  n't 
there  quite  yet.  "That  is  n't  all  that's  wanted." 

"  But  what  more  ? " 

"Why  that  his  wife  shall  have  made  him  really 
believe  that  she  really  believes."  With  which  Char 
lotte  became  still  more  lucidly  logical.  "The  reality  of 

233 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

his  belief  will  depend  in  such  a  case  on  the  reality  of 
hers.  The  Prince  may  for  instance  now,"  she  went  on, 
"have  made  out  to  his  satisfaction  that  Maggie  may 
mainly  desire  to  abound  in  your  sense,  whatever  it  is 
you  do.  He  may  remember  that  he  has  never  seen  her 
do  anything  else." 

"Well,"  said  Adam  Verver,  "what  kind  of  a  warn 
ing  will  he  have  found  in  that  ?  To  what  catastrophe 
will  he  have  observed  such  a  disposition  in  her  to 
lead?" 

"Just  to  this  one!"  With  which  she  struck  him  as 
rising  straighter  and  clearer  before  him  than  she  had 
done  even  yet. 

"Our  little  question  itself?"  Her  appearance  had 
in  fact  at  the  moment  such  an  effect  on  him  that  he 
could  answer  but  in  marvelling  mildness.  "  Had  n't 
we  better  wait  a  while  till  we  call  it  a  catastrophe  ? " 

Her  rejoinder  to  this  was  to  wait  —  though  by  no 
means  so  long  as  he  meant.  When  at  the  end  of  her 
minute  she  spoke,  however,  it  was  mildly  too.  "  What 
would  you  like,  dear  friend,  to  wait  for  ? "  It  lingered 
between  them  in  the  air,  this  demand,  and  they  ex 
changed  for  the  time  a  look  which  might  have  made 
each  of  them  seem  to  have  been  watching  in  the  other 
the  signs  of  its  overt  irony.  These  were  indeed  imme 
diately  so  visible  in  Mr.  Verver's  face  that,  as  if  a  little 
ashamed  of  having  so  markedly  produced  them  — 
and  as  if  also  to  bring  out  at  last,  under  pressure, 
something  she  had  all  the  while  been  keeping  back  — 
she  took  a  jump  to  pure  plain  reason.  "You  have  n't 
noticed  for  yourself,  but  I  can't  quite  help  noticing, 
that  in  spite  of  what  you  assume  —  we  assume,  if  you 

234 


THE  PRINCE 

like  —  Maggie  wires  her  joy  only  to  you.  She  makes 
no  sign  of  its  overflow  to  me." 

It  was  a  point  —  and,  staring  a  moment,  he  took 
account  of  it.  But  he  had,  as  before,  his  presence  of 
mind  —  to  say  nothing  of  his  kindly  humour.  "  Why 
you  complain  of  the  very  thing  that 's  most  charm 
ingly  conclusive !  She  treats  us  already  as  one." 

Clearly  now  for  the  girl,  in  spite  of  lucidity  and 
logic,  there  was  something  in  the  way  he  said 
things  — !  She  faced  him  in  all  her  desire  to  please 
him,  and  then  her  word  quite  simply  and  definitely 
showed  it.  "I  do  like  you,  you  know." 

Well,  what  could  this  do  but  stimulate  his  humour  ? 
"I  see  what's  the  matter  with  you.  You  won't  be 
quiet  till  you've  heard  from  the  Prince  himself.  I 
think,"  the  happy  man  added,  "that  I'll  go  and 
secretly  wire  to  him  that  you  'd  like,  reply  paid,  a  few 
words  for  yourself." 

It  could  apparently  but  encourage  her  further  to 
smile.  "  Reply  paid  for  him,  you  mean  —  or  for  me  ? " 

"Oh  I'll  pay  with  pleasure  anything  back  for 
you  —  as  many  words  as  you  like."  And  he  went 
on,  to  keep  it  up.  "  Not  requiring  either  to  see  your 
message." 

She  could  take  it,  visibly,  as  he  meant  it.  "Should 
you  require  to  see  the  Prince's  ? " 

"  Not  a  bit.  You  can  keep  that  also  to  yourself." 

On  his  speaking  however  as  if  his  transmitting  the 
hint  were  a  real  question,  she  appeared  to  consider  — 
and  almost  as  for  good  taste  —  that  the  joke  had 
gone  far  enough.  "  It  does  n't  matter.  Unless  he 
speaks  of  his  own  movement  — !  And  why  should 

235 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

it   be,"   she   asked,   "a  thing  that  would  occur  to 
him?" 

"I  really  think,"  Mr.  Verver  concurred,  "that  it 
naturally  would  n't.  He  does  n't  know  you  're 
morbid." 

She  just  wondered  —  but  she  agreed.  "No  —  he 
has  n't  yet  found  it  out.  Perhaps  he  will,  but  he 
has  n't  yet;  and  I'm  willing  to  give  him  meanwhile 
the  benefit  of  the  doubt."  So  with  this  the  situation,  to 
her  view,  would  appear  to  have  cleared  had  n't  she  too 
quickly  had  one  of  her  restless  relapses.  "Maggie, 
however,  does  know  I  'm  morbid.  She  has  n't  the 
benefit." 

"Well,"  said  Adam  Verver  a  little  wearily  at  last, 
"I  think  I  feel  that  you  '11  hear  from  her  yet."  It  had 
even  fairly  come  over  him,  under  recurrent  suggestion, 
that  his  daughter's  omission  was  surprising.  And 
Maggie  had  never  in  her  life  been  wrong  for  more 
than  three  minutes. 

"Oh  it  isn't  that  I  hold  that  I've  a  right  to  it," 
Charlotte  the  next  instant  rather  oddly  qualified  — 
and  the  observation  itself  gave  him  a  further  push. 

"Very  well  —  I  shall  like  it  myself." 

At  this  then,  as  if  moved  by  his  habit  of  mostly  — 
and  more  or  less  against  his  own  contention  —  coming 
round  to  her,  she  showed  how  she  could  also  ever, 
and  not  less  gently,  come  halfway.  "  I  speak  of  it  only 
as  the  missing  grace  —  the  grace  that 's  in  everything 
Maggie  does.  It  is  n't  my  due  "  —  she  kept  it  up  - 
"but,  taking  from  you  that  we  may  still  expect  it,  it 
will  have  the  touch.  It  will  be  beautiful." 

"Then  come  out  to  breakfast."    Mr.  Verver  had 
236 


THE  PRINCE 

looked  at  his  watch.  "It  will  be  here  when  we  get 
back." 

"  If  it  is  n't "  —  and  Charlotte  smiled  as  she  looked 
about  for  a  feather  boa  that  she  had  laid  down  on 
descending  from  her  room  —  "if  it  is  n't  it  will  have 
had  but  that  slight  fault." 

He  saw  her  boa  on  the  arm  of  the  chair  from  which 
she  had  moved  to  meet  him,  and,  after  he  had  fetched 
it,  raising  it  to  make  its  charming  softness  brush  his 
face  —  for  it  was  a  wondrous  product  of  Paris,  pur 
chased  under  his  direct  auspices  the  day  before  —  he 
held  it  there  a  minute  before  giving  it  up.  "Will  you 
promise  me  then  to  be  at  peace  ? " 

She  looked,  while  she  debated,  at  his  admirable 
present.  "I  promise  you." 

"Quite  for  ever?" 

"Quite  for  ever." 

"Remember,"  he  went  on,  to  justify  his  demand, 
"  remember  that  in  wiring  you  she  '11  naturally  speak 
even  more  for  her  husband  than  she  has  done  in 
wiring  me." 

It  was  only  at  a  word  that  Charlotte  had  a  demur. 
"'Naturally'  —  ?" 

"Why  our  marriage  puts  him  for  you,  you  see  — 
or  puts  you  for  him  —  into  a  new  relation,  whereas  it 
leaves  his  relation  to  me  unchanged.  It  therefore 
gives  him  more  to  say  to  you  about  it." 

"About  its  making  me  his  stepmother-in-law  —  or 
whatever  I  should  become  ?"  Over  which  for  a  little 
she  not  undivertedly  mused.  "Yes,  there  may  easily 
be  enough  for  a  gentleman  to  say  to  a  young  woman 
about  that." 

237 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"Well,  Amerigo  can  always  be,  according  to  the 
case,  either  as  funny  or  as  serious  as  you  like;  and 
whichever  he  may  be  for  you,  in  sending  you  a  mes 
sage,  he  '11  be  it  all."  And  then  as  the  girl,  with  one 
of  her  so  deeply  and  oddly,  yet  so  tenderly  critical 
looks  at  him,  failed  to  take  up  the  remark,  he  found 
himself  moved,  as  by  a  vague  anxiety,  .to  add  a  ques 
tion.  "Don't  you  think  he's  charming?" 

"Oh  charming,"  said  Charlotte  Stant.  "If  he 
were  n't  I  should  n't  mind." 

"No  more  should  I!"  her  friend  harmoniously  re 
turned. 

"Ah  but  you  don't  mind.  You  don't  have  to.  You 
don't  have  to,  I  mean,  as  I  have.  It's  the  last  folly 
ever  to  care,  in  an  anxious  way,  the  least  particle 
more  than  one's  absolutely  forced.  If  I  were  you," 
she  went  on  —  "if  I  had  in  my  life,  for  happiness  and 
power  and  peace,  even  a  small  fraction  of  what  you 
have,  it  would  take  a  great  deal  to  make  me  waste 
my  worry.  I  don't  know,"  she  said,  "what  in  the 
world  —  that  did  n't  touch  my  luck  —  I  should 
trouble  my  head  about." 

"I  quite  understand  you  —  yet  does  n't  it  just  de 
pend,"  Mr.  Verver  asked,  "on  what  you  call  one's 
luck?  It's  exactly  my  luck  that  I'm  talking  about. 
I  shall  be  as  sublime  as  you  like  when  you  've  made  me 
all  right.  It's  only  when  one  is  right  that  one  really 
has  the  things  you  speak  of.  It  is  n't  they,"  he  ex 
plained,  "that  make  one  so:  it's  the  something  else 
I  want  that  makes  them  right.  If  you  '11  give  me 
what  I  ask  you '11  see." 

She  had  taken  her  boa  and  thrown  it  over  her 
238 


shoulders,  and  her  eyes,  while  she  still  delayed,  had 
turned  from  him,  engaged  by  another  interest,  though 
the  court  was  by  this  time,  the  hour  of  dispersal  for 
luncheon,  so  forsaken  that  they  would  have  had  it, 
for  free  talk,  should  they  have  been  moved  to  loud- 
ness,  quite  to  themselves.  She  was  ready  for  their 
adjournment,  but  she  was  also  aware  of  a  pedestrian 
youth  in  uniform,  a  visible  emissary  of  the  Postes  et 
Telegraphies,  who  had  approached,  from  the  street, 
the  small  stronghold  of  the  concierge  and  who  pre 
sented  there  a  missive  taken  from  the  little  cartridge- 
box  slung  over  his  shoulder.  The  portress,  meeting  him 
on  the  threshold,  met  equally,  across  the  court,  Char 
lotte's  marked  attention  to  his  visit,  so  that  within  the 
minute  she  had  advanced  to  our  friends  with  her  cap- 
streamers  flying  and  her  smile  of  announcement  as 
ample  as  her  broad  white  apron.  She  raised  aloft  a 
telegraphic  message  and  as  she  delivered  it  sociably 
discriminated.  "Cette  fois-ci  pour  madame!"  — 
with  which  she  as  genially  retreated,  leaving  Charlotte 
in  possession.  Charlotte,  taking  it,  held  it  at  first 
unopened.  Her  eyes  had  come  back  to  her  companion, 
who  had  immediately  and  triumphantly  greeted  it. 
"Ah  there  you  are!" 

She  broke  the  envelope  then  in  silence,  and  for 
a  minute,  as  with  the  message  he  himself  had  put 
before  her,  studied  its  contents  without  a  sign.  He 
watched  her  without  a  question  and  at  last  she 
looked  up.  "I'll  give  you,"  she  simply  said,  "what 
you  ask." 

The  expression  of  her  face  was  strange  —  but  since 
when  had  a  woman's  at  moments  of  supreme  sur- 

239 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

render  not  a  right  to  be  ?  He  took  it  in  with  his  own 
long  look  and  his  grateful  silence  —  so  that  nothing 
more  for  some  instants  passed  between  them.  Their 
understanding  sealed  itself — he  already  felt  she  had 
made  him  right.  But  he  was  in  presence  too  of  the 
fact  that  Maggie  had  made  her  so;  and  always  there 
fore  without  Maggie  where  in  fine  would  he  be  ?  She 
united  them,  brought  them  together  as  with  the  click 
of  a  silver  spring,  so  that  on  the  spot,  with  the  vision 
of  it,  his  eyes  filled,  Charlotte  facing  him  meanwhile 
with  her  expression  made  still  stranger  by  the  blur  of 
his  gratitude.  Quite  through  it  withal  he  smiled. 
"What  my  child  does  for  me — !" 

Through  it  all  as  well,  that  is  still  through  the  blur, 
he  saw  Charlotte,  rather  than  heard  her,  reply.  She 
held  her  paper  wide  open,  but  her  eyes  were  wholly 
for  his.  "It  is  n't  Maggie.  It's  the  Prince." 

"I  say!" — he  gaily  rang  out.  "Then  it's  best  of 
all." 

"It's  enough." 

"Thank  you  for  thinking  so ! "  To  which  he  added : 
"  It 's  enough  for  our  question,  but  it  is  n't  —  is  it  ?  — 
quite  enough  for  our  breakfast  ?  Dejeunons." 

She  stood  there  however  in  spite  of  this  appeal, 
her  document  always  before  them.  "Don't  you  want 
to  read  it  ? " 

He  thought.  "Not  if  it  satisfies  you.  I  don't  require 
it." 

But  she  gave  him,  as  for  her  conscience,  another 
chance.  "You  can  if  you  like." 

He  hesitated  afresh,  but  as  for  amiability,  not  for 
curiosity.  "  Is  it  funny." 

240 


THE  PRINCE 

Thus,  finally,  she  again  dropped  her  eyes  on  it, 
drawing  in  her  lips  a  little.  "  No  —  I  call  it  grave." 

"Ah  then  I  don't  want  it." 

"Very  grave,"  said  Charlotte  Stant. 

"Well,  what  did  I  tell  you  of  him?"  he  asked, 
rejoicing,  as  they  started:  a  question  for  all  answer 
to  which,  before  she  took  his  arm,  the  girl  thrust  her 
paper  crumpled  into  the  pocket  of  her  coat. 


BOOK  THIRD 


I 


CHARLOTTE,  halfway  up  the  "monumental"  stair 
case,  had  begun  by  waiting  alone  —  waiting  to  be 
rejoined  by  her  companion,  who  had  gone  down  all 
the  way,  as  in  common  kindness  bound,  and  who, 
his  duty  performed,  would  know  where  to  find  her. 
She  was  meanwhile,  though  extremely  apparent,  not 
perhaps  absolutely  advertised ;  but  she  would  n't  have 
cared  if  she  had  been  —  so  little  was  it  by  this  time 
her  first  occasion  of  facing  society  with  a  conscious 
ness  materially,  with  a  confidence  quite  splendidly, 
enriched.  For  a  couple  of  years  now  she  had  known 
as  never  before  what  it  was  to  look  "well "  —  to  look, 
that  is,  as  well  as  she  had  always  felt,  from  far  back, 
that  in  certain  conditions  she  might.  On  such  an 
evening  as  this,  that  of  a  great  official  party  in  the  full 
flush  of  the  London  spring-time,  the  conditions  af 
fected  her,  her  nerves,  her  senses,  her  imagination,  as 
all  profusely  present;  so  that  perhaps  at  no  moment 
yet  had  she  been  so  justified  of  her  faith  as  at  the  par 
ticular  instant  of  our  being  again  concerned  with  her, 
that  of  her  chancing  to  glance  higher  up  from  where 
she  stood  and  meeting  in  consequence  the  quiet  eyes 
of  Colonel  Assingham,  who  had  his  elbows  on  the 
broad  balustrade  of  the  great  gallery  overhanging 
the  staircase  and  who  immediately  exchanged  with  her 
one  of  his  most  artlessly  familiar  signals.  This  sim 
plicity  of  his  visual  attention  struck  her,  even  with  the 

245 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

other  things  she  had  to  think  about,  as  the  quietest 
note  in  the  whole  high  pitch  —  much  in  fact  as  if  she 
had  pressed  a  finger  on  a  chord  or  a  key  and  created, 
for  the  number  of  seconds,  an  arrest  of  vibration,  a 
more  muffled  thump.  The  sight  of  him  suggested 
indeed  that  Fanny  would  be  there,  though  so  far  as 
opportunity  went  she  had  n't  seen  her.  This  was 
about  the  limit  of  what  it  could  suggest. 

The  air,  however,  had  suggestions  enough  —  it 
abounded  in  them,  many  of  them  precisely  helping  to 
constitute  those  conditions  with  which,  for  our  young 
woman,  the  hour  was  brilliantly  crowned.  She  was 
herself  in  truth  crowned,  and  it  all  hung  together, 
melted  together,  in  light  and  colour  and  sound:  the 
unsurpassed  diamonds  that  her  head  so  happily  car 
ried,  the  other  jewels,  the  other  perfections  of  aspect 
and  arrangement  that  made  her  personal  scheme  a 
success,  the  proved  private  theory  that  materials  to 
work  with  had  been  all  she  required  and  that  there 
were  none  too  precious  for  her  to  understand  and  use 
—  to  which  might  be  added  lastly,  as  the  strong- 
scented  flower  of  the  total  sweetness,  an  easy  com 
mand,  a  high  enjoyment,  of  her  crisis.  For  a  crisis 
she  was  ready  to  take  it,  and  this  ease  it  was,  doubt 
less,  that  helped  her,  while  she  waited,  to  the  right 
assurance,  to  the  right  indifference,  to  the  right  ex 
pression,  and  above  all,  as  she  felt,  to  the  right  view 
of  her  opportunity  for  happiness  —  unless  indeed  the 
opportunity  itself,  rather,  were,  in  its  mere  strange 
amplitude,  the  producing,  the  precipitating  cause. 
The  ordered  revellers,  rustling  and  shining,  with 
sweep  of  train  and  glitter  of  star  and  clink  of  sword, 

246 


THE  PRINCE 

and  yet  for  all  this  but  so  imperfectly  articulate,  so 
vaguely  vocal  —  the  double  stream  of  the  coming 
and  the  going,  flowing  together  where  she  stood, 
passed  her,  brushed  her,  treated  her  to  much  crude 
contemplation  and  now  and  then  to  a  spasm  of  speech, 
an  offered  hand,  even  in  some  cases  to  an  unencour- 
aged  pause;  but  she  missed  no  countenance  and  in 
vited  no  protection :  she  fairly  liked  to  be,  so  long  as  she 
might,  just  as  she  was  —  exposed  a  little  to  the  pub 
lic,  no  doubt,  in  her  unaccompanied  state,  but,  even 
if  it  were  a  bit  brazen,  careless  of  queer  reflexions  on 
the  dull  polish  of  London  faces,  and  exposed,  since  it 
was  a  question  of  exposure,  to  much  more  competent 
recognitions  of  her  own.  She  hoped  no  one  would 
stop  —  she  was  positively  keeping  herself;  it  was  her 
idea  to  mark  in  a  particular  manner  the  importance 
of  something  that  had  just  happened.  She  knew  how 
she  should  mark  it,  and  what  she  was  doing  there 
made  already  a  beginning. 

When  she  presently  therefore  from  her  vantage  saw 
the  Prince  come  back  she  had  an  impression  of  all  the 
place  as  higher  and  wider  and  more  appointed  for 
great  moments;  with  its  dome  of  lustres  lifted,  its 
ascents  and  descents  more  majestic,  its  marble  tiers 
more  vividly  overhung,  its  numerosity  of  royalties, 
foreign  and  domestic,  more  unprecedented,  its  sym 
bolism  of  "State**  hospitality  both  emphasised  and 
refined.  This  was  doubtless  a  large  consequence  of 
a  fairly  familiar  cause,  a  considerable  inward  stir  to 
spring  from  the  mere  vision,  striking  as  that  might  be, 
of  Amerigo  in  a  crowd ;  but  she  had  her  reasons,  she 
held  them  there,  she  carried  them  in  fact,  respons- 

247 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

ibly  and  overtly,  as  she  carried  her  head,  her  high 
tiara,  her  folded  fan,  her  indifferent  unattended  emin 
ence  ;  and  it  was  when  he  reached  her  and  she  could, 
taking  his  arm,  show  herself  as  placed  in  her  relation, 
that  she  felt  supremely  justified.  It  was  her  notion  of 
course  that  she  gave  a  glimpse  of  but  few  of  her 
grounds  for  this  discrimination  —  indeed  of  the  most 
evident  alone;  yet  she  would  have  been  half-willing  it 
should  be  guessed  how  she  drew  inspiration,  drew 
support,  in  quantity  sufficient  for  almost  anything, 
from  the  individual  value  that,  through  all  the  picture, 
her  husband's  son-in-law  kept  for  the  eye,  deriving 
it  from  his  fine  unconscious  way,  in  the  swarming 
social  sum,  of  outshining,  overlooking  and  overtop 
ping.  It  was  as  if  in  separation,  even  the  shortest,  she 
half-forgot  or  disbelieved  how  he  affected  her  sight, 
so  that  reappearance  had  in  him  each  time  a  virtue  of 
its  own  —  a  kind  of  disproportionate  intensity  sug 
gesting  his  connexion  with  occult  sources  of  renewal. 
What  did  he  do  when  he  was  away  from  her  that 
made  him  always  come  back  only  looking,  as  she 
would  have  called  it,  "more  so"?  Superior  to  any 
shade  of  cdbotinage,  he  yet  almost  resembled  an  actor 
who,  between  his  moments  on  the  stage,  revisits  his 
dressing-room,  and,  before  the  glass,  pressed  by  his 
need  of  effect,  retouches  his  make-up.  The  Prince 
was  at  present  for  instance,  though  he  had  quitted  her 
but  ten  minutes  before,  still  more  than  then  the  per 
son  it  pleased  her  to  be  left  with  —  a  truth  that  had 
all  its  force  for  her  while  he  made  her  his  care  for 
their  conspicuous  return  together  to  the  upper  rooms. 
Conspicuous  beyond  any  wish  they  could  entertain 

248 


THE  PRINCE 

was  what,  poor  wonderful  man,  he  could  n't  help 
making  it;  and  when  she  raised  her  eyes  again,  on  the 
ascent,  to  Bob  Assingham,  still  aloft  in  his  gallery  and 
still  looking  down  at  her,  she  was  aware  that,  in  spite 
of  hovering  and  warning  inward  voices,  she  even  en 
joyed  the  testimony  rendered  by  his  lonely  vigil  to  the 
lustre  she  reflected. 

He  was  always  lonely  at  great  parties,  the  dear 
Colonel  —  it  was  n't  in  such  places  that  the  seed  he 
sowed  at  home  was  ever  reaped  by  him;  but  nobody 
could  have  seemed  to  mind  it  less,  to  brave  it  with 
more  bronzed  indifference;  so  markedly  that  he 
moved  about  less  like  one  of  the  guests  than  like  some 
quite  presentable  person  in  charge  of  the  police  ar 
rangements  or  the  electric  light.  To  Mrs.  Verver,  as 
will  be  seen,  he  represented,  with  the  perfect  good 
faith  of  his  apparent  blankness,  something  definite 
enough;  though  her  bravery  was  not  thereby  too 
blighted  for  her  to  feel  herself  calling  him  to  witness 
that  the  only  witchcraft  her  companion  had  used, 
within  the  few  minutes,  was  that  of  attending  Maggie, 
who  had  withdrawn  from  the  scene,  to  her  carriage. 
Notified  at  all  events  of  Fanny's  probable  presence, 
Charlotte  was  for  a  while  after  this  divided  between 
the  sense  of  it  as  a  fact  somehow  to  reckon  with  and 
deal  with,  which  was  a  perception  that  made  in  its 
degree  for  the  prudence,  the  pusillanimity  of  post 
ponement,  of  avoidance  —  and  a  quite  other  feeling, 
an  impatience  that  presently  ended  by  prevailing,  an 
eagerness,  really,  to  be  suspected,  sounded,  veritably 
arraigned,  if  only  that  she  might  have  the  bad  moment 
over,  if  only  that  she  might  prove  to  herself,  let  alone 

249 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

to  Mrs.  Assingham  also,  that  she  could  convert  it  to 
good;  if  only  in  short  to  be  "square,"  as  they  said, 
with  her  question.  For  herself  indeed  particularly  it 
was  n't  a  question;  but  something  in  her  bones  told 
her  that  Fanny  would  treat  it  as  one,  and  there  was 
truly  nothing  that  from  this  friend  she  was  n't  bound 
in  decency  to  take.  She  might  hand  things  back  with 
every  tender  precaution,  with  acknowledgements  and 
assurances,  but  she  owed  it  to  them  in  any  case,  and 
owed  it  to  all  Mrs.  Assingham  had  done  for  her,  not 
to  get  rid  of  them  without  having  well  unwrapped 
them  and  turned  them  over. 

To-night,  as  happened  —  and  she  recognised  it 
more  and  more,  with  the  ebbing  minutes,  as  an  influ 
ence  of  everything  about  her — to-night  exactly  she 
would,  no  doubt,  since  she  knew  why,  be  as  firm  as 
she  might  at  any  near  moment  again  hope  to  be  for 
going  through  that  process  with  the  right  temper  and 
tone.  She  said  after  a  little  to  the  Prince  "  Stay  with 
me ;  let  no  one  take  you ;  for  I  want  her,  yes,  I  do  want 
her,  to  see  us  together,  and  the  sooner  the  better  "  — 
said  it  to  keep  her  hand  on  him  through  constant  di 
versions,  and  made  him  in  fact  by  saying  it  profess  a 
momentary  vagueness.  She  had  to  explain  to  him 
that  it  was  Fanny  Assingham  she  wanted  to  see  — 
who  clearly  would  be  there,  since  the  Colonel  never 
either  stirred  without  her  or,  once  arrived,  concerned 
himself  for  her  fate ;  and  she  had  further,  after  Amer 
igo  had  met  her  with  "  See  us  together  ?  why  in  the 
world  ?  has  n't  she  often  seen  us  together  ? "  to  inform 
him  that  what  had  elsewhere  and  otherwise  happened 
did  n't  now  matter  and  that  she  at  any  rate  well  knew 

250 


THE  PRINCE 

for  the  occasion  what  she  was  about.  "You're 
strange,  cara  mia,"  he  consentingly  enough  dropped ; 
but,  for  whatever  strangeness,  he  kept  her,  as  they 
circulated,  from  being  waylaid,  even  remarking  to  her 
afresh,  as  he  had  often  done  before,  on  the  help  ren 
dered  in  such  situations  by  the  intrinsic  oddity  of  the 
London  "squash,"  a  thing  of  vague  slow  senseless 
eddies,  revolving  as  in  fear  of  some  menace  of  conver 
sation  suspended  over  it,  the  drop  of  which,  with  a 
consequent  refreshing  splash  or  spatter,  yet  never  took 
place.  Of  course  she  was  strange ;  this,  as  they  went, 
Charlotte  knew  for  herself:  how  could  she  be  any 
thing  else  when  the  situation  holding  her,  and  holding 
him,  for  that  matter,  just  as  much,  had  so  the  stamp  of 
it  ?  She  had  already  accepted  her  consciousness,  as  we 
have  already  noted,  that  a  crisis  for  them  all  was  in 
the  air ;  and  when  such  hours  were  n't  depressing, 
which  was  the  form  indeed  in  which  she  had  mainly 
known  them,  they  were  apparently  in  a  high  degree 
exhilarating. 

Later  on,  in  a  corner  to  which,  at  sight  of  an  empty 
sofa,  Mrs.  Assingham  had,  after  a  single  attentive 
arrest,  led  her  with  a  certain  earnestness,  this  vision 
of  the  critical  was  much  more  sharpened  than  blurred. 
Fanny  had  taken  it  from  her :  yes,  she  was  there  with 
Amerigo  alone,  Maggie  having  come  with  them  and 
then,  within  ten  minutes,  changed  her  mind,  repented 
and  departed.  "So  you're  staying  on  together  with 
out  her?"  the  elder  woman  had  asked;  and  it  was 
Charlotte's  answer  to  this  that  had  determined  for 
them,  quite  indeed  according  to  the  latter's  expecta-. 
tion,  the  need  of  some  seclusion  and  her  companion's 

251 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

pounce  at  the  sofa.  They  were  staying  on  together 
alone,  and  —  oh  distinctly !  —  it  was  alone  that  Mag 
gie  had  driven  away,  her  father,  as  usual,  not  having 
managed  to  come.  "'As  usual'  —  ?"  Mrs.  Assing- 
ham  had  seemed  to  wonder;  Mr.  Verver's  reluctances 
not  having,  she  in  fact  quite  intimated,  hitherto  struck 
her.  Charlotte  responded  at  any  rate  that  his  indis 
position  to  go  out  had  lately  much  increased  —  even 
though  to-night,  as  she  admitted,  he  had  pleaded  his 
not  feeling  well.  Maggie  had  wished  to  stay  with  him 
—  for  the  Prince  and  she,  dining  out,  had  afterwards 
called  in  Portland  Place,  whence,  in  the  event,  they 
had  brought  her,  Charlotte,  on.  Maggie  had  come 
but  to  oblige  her  father  —  she  had  urged  the  two 
others  to  go  without  her;  then  she  had  yielded  for  the 
time  to  Mr.  Verver's  persuasion.  But  here,  when  they 
had,  after  the  long  wait  in  the  carriage,  fairly  got  inf 
here,  once  up  the  stairs  and  with  the  rooms  before 
them,  remorse  had  ended  by  seizing  her :  she  had  list 
ened  to  no  other  remonstrance,  and  at  present  there 
fore,  as  Charlotte  put  it,  the  two  were  doubtless  mak 
ing  together  a  little  party  at  home.  But  it  was  all 
right  —  so  Charlotte  also  put  it :  there  was  nothing  in 
the  world  they  liked  better  than  these  snatched  felic 
ities,  little  parties,  long  talks,  with  "  I  '11  come  to  you 
to-morrow,"  and  "No,  I'll  come  to  you"  make- 
believe  renewals  of  their  old  life.  They  were  fairly 
at  times,  the  dear  things,  like  children  playing  at 
paying  visits,  playing  at  "Mr.  Thompson  and  Mrs. 
Fane,"  each  hoping  that  the  other  would  really  stay 
to  tea.  Charlotte  was  sure  she  should  find  Maggie 
there  on  getting  home  —  a  remark  in  which  Mrs. 

252 


THE   PRINCE 

Verver's  immediate  response  to  her  friend's  enquiry 
had  culminated.  She  had  thus  on  the  spot  the  sense 
of  having  given  her  plenty  to  think  about,  and  that 
moreover  of  liking  to  see  it  even  better  than  she  had 
expected.  She  had  plenty  to  think  about  herself,  and 
there  was  already  something  in  Fanny  that  made  it 
seem  still  more. 

"  You  say  your  husband 's  ill  ?  He  felt  too  ill  to 
come  ? " 

"No,  my  dear  —  I  think  not.  If  he  had  been  too  ill 
I  would  n't  have  left  him." 

"And  yet  Maggie  was  worried  ?"  Mrs.  Assingham 
asked. 

"She  worries  easily,  you  know.  She's  afraid  of 
influenza  —  of  which  he  has  had  at  different  times 
several  attacks,  though  never  with  the  least  gravity." 

"  But  you  're  not  afraid  of  it  ? " 

Charlotte  had  for  a  moment  a  pause;  it  had  contin 
ued  to  come  to  her  that  really  to  have  her  case  "out," 
as  they  said,  with  the  person  in  the  world  to  whom  her 
most  intimate  difficulties  had  oftenest  referred  them 
selves,  would  help  her  on  the  whole  more  than  hinder; 
and  under  that  feeling  all  her  opportunity,  with  no 
thing  kept  back,  with  a  thing  or  two  perhaps  even 
thrust  forward,  seemed  temptingly  to  open.  Besides, 
did  n't  Fanny  at  bottom  half-expect,  absolutely  at 
the  bottom  half-iuaw/,  things  ?  —  so  that  she  'd  be  dis 
appointed  if,  after  what  must  just  have  occurred  for 
her,  she  did  n't  get  something  to  put  between  the  teeth 
of  her  so  restless  rumination,  that  cultivation  of  the 
fear,  of  which  our  young  woman  had  already  had 
glimpses,  that  she  might  have  "gone  too  far"  in  her 

253 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

irrepressible  interest  in  other  lives.  What  had  just 
happened  —  it  pieced  itself  together  for  Charlotte  — 
was  that  the  Assingham  sposi,  drifting  like  every  one 
else,  had  had  somewhere  in  the  gallery,  in  the  rooms, 
an  accidental  concussion;  had  it  after  the  Colonel, 
over  his  balustrade,  had  observed,  in  the  favouring 
high  light,  her  public  junction  with  the  Prince.  His 
very  dryness  in  this  encounter  would  have,  as  always, 
struck  a  spark  from  his  wife's  curiosity,  and,  familiar, 
on  his  side,  with  all  that  she  saw  in  things,  he  must 
have  thrown  her,  as  a  fine  little  bone  to  pick,  some 
report  of  the  way  one  of  her  young  friends  was  "going 
on  "  with  another.  He  knew  perfectly  —  such  at  least 
was  Charlotte's  liberal  assumption  —  that  she  was  n't 
going  on  with  any  one,  but  she  also  knew  that,  given 
the  circumstances,  she  was  inevitably  to  be  sacrificed, 
in  some  form  or  another,  to  the  humorous  intercourse 
of  the  inimitable  pair.  The  Prince  meanwhile  had 
also,  under  coercion,  sacrificed  her;  the  Ambassador 
had  come  up  to  him  with  a  message  from  Royalty,  to 
whom  he  was  led  away;  after  which  she  had  talked 
for  five  minutes  with  Sir  John  Brinder,  who  had 
been  of  the  Ambassador's  company  and  who  had 
rather  artlessly  remained  with  her.  Fanny  had  then 
arrived  in  sight  of  them  at  the  same  moment  as  some 
one  else  she  did  n't  know,  some  one  who  knew  Mrs. 
Assingham  and  also  knew  Sir  John.  Charlotte  had 
left  it  to  her  friend's  competence  to  throw  the  two 
others  immediately  together  and  to  find  a  way  for 
entertaining  her  in  closer  quarters.  This  was  the  little 
history  of  the  vision  in  her  that  was  now  rapidly  help 
ing  her  to  recognise  a  precious  chance,  the  chance  that 

254 


might  n't  again  soon  be  so  good  for  the  vivid  making 
of  a  point.  Her  point  was  before  her;  it  was  sharp, 
bright,  true;  above  all  it  was  her  own.  She  had 
reached  it  quite  by  herself;  no  one,  not  even  Amerigo 
—  Amerigo  least  of  all,  who  would  have  nothing  to  do 
with  it  —  had  given  her  aid.  To  make  it  now  with 
force  for  Fanny  Assingham's  benefit  would  see  her 
further,  in  the  direction  in  which  the  light  had 
dawned,  than  any  other  spring  she  should  doubtless 
yet  awhile  be  able  to  press.  The  direction  was  that  of 
her  greater  freedom  —  which  was  all  in  the  world  she 
had  in  mind.  Her  opportunity  had  accordingly,  after  a 
few  minutes  of  Mrs.  Assingham's  almost  imprudently 
interested  expression  of  face,  positively  acquired  such 
a  price  for  her  that  she  may  for  ourselves,  while  the 
intensity  lasted,  rather  resemble  a  person  holding  out 
a  small  mirror  at  arm's  length  and  consulting  it  with 
a  special  turn  of  the  head.  It  was  in  a  word  with  this 
value  of  her  chance  that  she  was  intelligently  playing 
when  she  said  in  answer  to  Fanny's  last  question: 
"  Don't  you  remember  what  you  told  me,  on  the  occa 
sion  of  something  or  other,  the  other  day  ?  That  you 
believe  there's  nothing  I'm  afraid  of?  So,  my  dear, 
don't  ask  me!" 

"  May  n't  I  ask  you,"  Mrs.  Assingham  returned, 
"  how  the  case  stands  with  your  poor  husband  ? " 

"Certainly,  dear.  Only  when  you  ask  me  as  if  I 
might  n't  perhaps  know  what  to  think,  it  seems  to  me 
best  to  let  you  see  that  I  know  perfectly  what  to 
think." 

Mrs.  Assingham  had  a  wait,  then,  blinking  a  little, 
she  took  her  risk.  "You  did  n't  think  that  if  it  was 

255 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

a  question  of  any  one's  returning  to  him  in  his  trouble 
it  would  be  better  you  yourself  should  have  gone  ? " 

Well,  Charlotte's  answer  to  this  enquiry  visibly 
shaped  itself  in  the  interest  of  the  highest  considera 
tions.  The  highest  considerations  were  good  humour, 
candour,  clearness  and,  obviously,  the  real  truth.  "  If 
we  could  n't  be  perfectly  frank  and  dear  with  each 
other  it  would  be  ever  so  much  better,  would  n't  it  ? 
that  we  should  n't  talk  about  anything  at  all;  which 
however  would  be  dreadful  —  and  we  certainly  at  any 
rate  have  n't  yet  come  to  it.  You  can  ask  me  anything 
under  the  sun  you  like,  because,  don't  you  see  ?  you 
can't  upset  me." 

"  I  'm  sure,  my  dear  Charlotte,"  Fanny  Assingham 
laughed,  "  I  don't  want  to  upset  you." 

"  Indeed,  love,  you  simply  could  n't  even  if  you 
thought  it  necessary  —  that's  all  I  mean.  Nobody 
could,  for  it  belongs  to  my  situation  that  I  'm,  by  no 
merit  of  my  own,  just  fixed  —  fixed  as  fast  as  a  pin 
stuck  up  to  its  head  in  a  cushion.  I  'm  placed  —  I 
can't  imagine  any  one  more  placed.  There  I  am!" 

Fanny  had  indeed  never  listened  to  emphasis  more 
firmly  applied,  and  it  brought  into  her  own  eyes, 
though  she  had  reasons  for  striving  to  keep  them  from 
betrayals,  a  sort  of  anxiety  of  intelligence.  "  I  dare 
say  —  but  your  statement  of  your  position,  however 
you  see  it,  is  n't  an  answer  to  my  enquiry.  I  confess 
it  seems  to  me  at  the  same  time,"  Mrs.  Assingham 
added,  "to  give  but  the  more  reason  for  it.  You  speak 
of  our  being  'frank.'  How  can  we  possibly  be  any 
thing  else  ?  If  Maggie  has  gone  off  through  finding 
herself  too  distressed  to  stay,  and  if  she 's  willing  to 

256 


THE  PRINCE 

leave  you  and  her  husband  to  show  here  without  her, 
are  n't  the  grounds  of  her  preoccupation  more  or  less 
discussable  ? " 

"If  they're  not,"  Charlotte  replied,  "it's  only  from 
their  being  in  a  way  too  evident.  They  're  not  grounds 
for  me  —  they  were  n't  when  I  accepted  Adam's  pre 
ference  that  I  should  come  to-night  without  him :  just 
as  I  accept  absolutely,  as  a  fixed  rule,  all  his  prefer 
ences.  But  that  of  course  does  n't  alter  the  fact  that 
my  husband's  daughter  rather  than  his  wife  should 
have  felt  she  could  after  all  be  the  one  to  stay  with 
him,  the  one  to  make  the  sacrifice  of  this  hour  — 
seeing  especially  that  the  daughter  has  a  husband  of 
her  own  in  the  field."  With  which  she  produced,  as  it 
were,  her  explanation.  "  I  've  simply  to  see  the  truth 
of  the  matter  —  see  that  Maggie  thinks  more  on  the 
whole  of  fathers  than  of  husbands.  And  my  situation 
is  such,"  she  went  on,  "that  this  becomes  immedi 
ately,  don't  you  understand  ?  a  thing  I  have  to  count 
with." 

Mrs.  Assingham,  vaguely  heaving,  panting  a  little 
but  trying  not  to  show  it,  turned  about,  from  some 
inward  spring,  in  her  seat.  "If  you  mean  such  a  thing 
as  that  she  does  n't  adore  the  Prince  — ! " 

"I  don't  say  she  does  n't  adore  him.  What  I  say 
is  that  she  does  n't  think  of  him.  One  of  those  con 
ditions  does  n't  always  at  all  stages  involve  the  other. 
This  is  just  how  she  adores  him,"  Charlotte  said. 
"And  what  reason  is  there  in  the  world,  after  all,  why 
he  and  I  should  n't,  as  you  say,  show  together  ?  We  've 
shown  together,  my  dear,"  she  smiled,  "before." 

Her  friend,  for  a  little,  only  looked  at  her  —  speak- 

257 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

ing  then  with  abruptness.  "You  ought  to  be  abso 
lutely  happy.  You  live  with  such  good  people." 

The  effect  of  it,  as  well,  was  an  arrest  for  Charlotte ; 
whose  face  however,  all  of  whose  fine  and  slightly  hard 
radiance,  it  had  the  next  instant  caused  further  to 
brighten.  "Does  one  ever  put  into  words  anything 
so  fatuously  rash  ?  It 's  a  thing  that  must  be  said,  in 
prudence,  for  one  —  by  somebody  who 's  so  good  as  to 
take  the  responsibility:  the  more  that  it  gives  one 
always  a  chance  to  show  one's  best  manners  by  not 
contradicting  it.  Certainly,  you  '11  never  have  the  dis 
tress,  or  whatever,  of  hearing  me  complain." 

"Truly,  my  dear,  I  hope  in  all  conscience  not!"  — 
and  the  elder  woman's  spirit  found  relief  in  a  laugh 
more  resonant  than  was  quite  advised  by  their  pursuit 
of  privacy. 

To  this  demonstration  her  friend  gave  no  heed. 
"With  all  our  absence  after  marriage,  and  with  the 
separation  from  her  produced  in  particular  by  our 
so  many  months  in  America,  Maggie  has  still  arrears, 
still  losses  to  make  up  —  still  the  need  of  showing 
how,  for  so  long,  she  simply  kept  missing  him.  She 
missed  his  company  —  a  large  allowance  of  which  is, 
in  spite  of  everything  else,  of  the  first  necessity  to  her. 
So  she  puts  it  in  when  she  can  —  a  little  here,  a  little 
there,  and  it  ends  by  making  up  a  considerable 
amount.  The  fact  of  our  distinct  establishments  — 
which  has  all  the  same  everything  in  its  favour,"  Char 
lotte  hastened  to  declare — "makes  her  really  see  more 
of  him  than  when  they  had  the  same  house.  To  make 
sure  she  does  n't  fail  of  it  she 's  always  arranging  for 
it  —  which  she  did  n't  have  to  do  while  they  lived  to- 

258 


gether.  But  she  likes  to  arrange,"  Charlotte  steadily 
proceeded;  "it  peculiarly  suits  her;  and  the  result  of 
our  separate  households  is  really,  for  them,  more  con 
tact  and  more  intimacy.  To-night  for  instance  has 
been  practically  an  arrangement.  She  likes  him  best 
alone.  And  it's  the  way,"  said  our  young  woman, 
"in  which  he  best  likes  her.  It's  what  I  mean  there 
fore  by  being ''placed.'  And  the  great  thing  is,  as  they 
say,  to  '  know '  one's  place.  Does  n't  it  all  strike  you," 
she  wound  up,  "  as  rather  placing  the  Prince  too  ? " 

Fanny  Assingham  had  at  this  moment  the  sense  as 
of  a  large  heaped  dish  presented  to  her  intelligence 
and  inviting  it  to  a  feast  —  so  thick  were  the  notes  of 
intention  in  this  remarkable  speech.  But  she  also  felt 
that  to  plunge  at  random,  to  help  herself  too  freely, 
would  —  apart  from  there  not  being  at  such  a  mo 
ment  time  for  it  —  tend  to  jostle  the  ministering 
hand,  confound  the  array  and,  more  vulgarly  speak 
ing,  make  a  mess.  She  picked  out  after  consideration 
a  solitary  plum.  "So  placed  that  you  have  to 
arrange  ? " 

"Certainly  I  have  to  arrange." 

"And  the  Prince  also  —  if  the  effect  for  him  is  the 
same  ? " 

"Really  I  think  not  less." 

"And  does  he  arrange,"  Mrs.  Assingham  asked, 
"to  make  up  bis  arrears  ? "  The  question  had  risen  to 
her  lips  —  it  was  as  if  another  morsel,  on  the  dish,  had 
tempted  her.  The  sound  of  it  at  once  struck  her  own 
ear  as  giving  out  more  of  her  thought  than  she  had  as 
yet  intended;  but  she  quickly  saw  that  she  must  fol 
low  it  up,  at  any  risk,  with  simplicity,  and  that  what 

259 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

was  simplest  was  the  ease  of  boldness.  "Make  them 
up,  I  mean,  by  coming  to  see  you?" 

Charlotte  replied  however  without,  as  her  friend 
would  have  phrased  it,  turning  a  hair.  She  shook 
her  head,  but  it  was  beautifully  gentle.  "He  never 
comes." 

"Oh ! "  said  Fanny  Assingham :  with  which  she  felt 
a  little  stupid. 

"There  it  is.  He  might  so  well,  you  know,  other 
wise." 

" '  Otherwise  *  ? "  —  and  Fanny  was  still  vague. 

It  passed  this  time  over  her  companion,  whose  eyes, 
wandering  to  a  distance,  found  themselves  held.  The 
Prince  was  at  hand  again;  the  Ambassador  was  still 
at  his  side;  they  were  stopped  a  moment  by  a  uni 
formed  personage,  a  little  old  man,  of  apparently  the 
highest  military  character,  bristling  with  medals  and 
orders.  This  gave  Charlotte  time  to  go  on.  "  He  has 
not  been  for  three  months."  And  then  as  with  her 
friend's  last  word  in  her  ear :  "  *  Otherwise '  —  yes. 
He  arranges  otherwise.  And  in  my  position,"  she 
added,  "I  might  too.  It's  too  absurd  we  should  n't 
meet." 

"You've  met,  I  gather,"  said  Fanny  Assingham, 
"to-night." 

"Yes  —  as  far  as  that  goes.  But  what  I  mean  is 
that  I  might  —  placed  for  it  as  we  both  are  —  go  to  see 
him." 

"And  do  you  ?"  Fanny  asked  with  almost  mistaken 
solemnity. 

The  perception  of  this  excess  made  Charlotte, 
whether  for  gravity  or  for  irony,  hang  fire  a  minute. 

260 


THE   PRINCE 

"I  have  been.  But  that's  nothing,"  she  said,  "in 
itself,  and  I  tell  you  of  it  only  to  show  you  how  our 
situation  works.  It  essentially  becomes  one,  a  situa 
tion,  for  both  of  us.  The  Prince's  however  is  his  own 
affair  —  I  meant  but  to  speak  of  mine." 

"Your  situation's  perfect,"  Mrs.  Assingham  pre 
sently  declared. 

"  I  don't  say  it  is  n't.  Taken  in  fact  all  round  I 
think  it  is.  And  I  don't,  as  I  tell  you,  complain  of  it. 
The  only  thing  is  that  I  have  to  act  as  it  demands  of 
me." 

"To  'act'?"  said  Mrs.  Assingham  with  an  irre 
pressible  quaver. 

"  Is  n't  it  acting,  my  dear,  to  accept  it  ?  I  do  accept 
it.  What  do  you  want  me  to  do  less  ?" 

"  I  want  you  to  believe  that  you  're  a  very  fortunate 
person." 

"Do  you  call  that  less?"  Charlotte  asked  with  a 
smile.  "From  the  point  of  view  of  my  freedom  I  call 
it  more.  Let  it  take,  my  position,  any  name  you  like." 

"Don't  let  it  at  any  rate"  —  and  Mrs.  Assingham's 
impatience  prevailed  at  last  over  her  presence  of  mind 
—  "don't  let  it  make  you  think  too  much  of  your  free 
dom." 

"  I  don't  know  what  you  call  too  much  —  for  how 
can  I  not  see  it  as  it  is  ?  You  'd  see  your  own  quickly 
enough  if  the  Colonel  gave  you  the  same  liberty  — 
and  I  have  n't  to  tell  you,  with  your  so  much  greater 
knowledge  of  everything,  what  it  is  that  gives  such 
liberty  most.  For  yourself  personally  of  course," 
Charlotte  went  on,  "you  only  know  the  state  of  neither 
needing  it  nor  missing  it.  Your  husband  does  n't  treat 

261 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

you  as  of  less  importance  to  him  than  some  other 
woman." 

"Ah  don't  talk  to  me  of  other  women!"  Fanny 
now  overtly  panted.  "Do  you  call  Mr.  Verver's  per 
fectly  natural  interest  in  his  daughter  —  ? " 

"The  greatest  affection  of  which  he 's  capable  ? "  — 
Charlotte  took  it  up  in  all  readiness.  "  I  do  distinctly 
—  and  in  spite  of  my  having  done  all  I  could  think  of 
to  make  him  capable  of  a  greater.  I  Ve  done,  ear 
nestly,  everything  I  could  —  I  Ve  made  it,  month 
after  month,  my  study.  But  I  have  n't  succeeded  — 
that  has  been  vividly  brought  home  to  me  to-night.  • 
However,"  she  pursued,  "I've  hoped  against  hope, 
for  I  recognise  that,  as  I  told  you  at  the  time,  I  was 
duly  warned."  And  then  as  she  met  in  her  friend's 
face  the  absence  of  any  such  remembrance :  "  He  did 
tell  me  he  wanted  me  just  because  I  could  be  useful 
about  her."  With  which  Charlotte  broke  into  a  won 
derful  smile.  "So  you  see  I  am!" 

It  was  on  Fanny  Assingham's  lips  for  the  moment 
to  reply  that  this  was  on  the  contrary  what  she  saw 
least  of  all;  she  came  in  fact  within  an  ace  of  saying: 
"  You  strike  me  as  having  quite  failed  to  help  his  idea 
to  work  —  since  by  your  account  Maggie  has  him  not 
less,  but  so  much  more,  on  her  mind.  How  in  the 
world,  with  so  much  of  a  remedy,  comes  there  to 
remain  so  much  of  what  was  to  be  obviated  ? "  But 
she  saved  herself  in  time,  conscious  above  all  that  she 
was  in  presence  of  still  deeper  things  than  she  had  yet 
dared  to  fear,  that  there  was  "more  in  it"  than  any 
admission  she  had  made  represented  —  and  she  had 
held  herself  familiar  with  admissions :  so  that,  not  to 

262 


THE  PRINCE 

seem  to  understand  where  she  could  n't  accept,  and 
not  to  seem  to  accept  where  she  could  n't  approve,  and 
could  still  less,  with  precipitation,  advise,  she  invoked 
the  mere  appearance  of  casting  no  weight  whatever 
into  the  scales  of  her  young  friend's  consistency.  The 
only  thing  was  that,  as  she  was  quickly  enough  to  feel, 
she  invoked  it  rather  to  excess.  It  brought  her,  her 
invocation,  too  abruptly  to  her  feet.  She  brushed 
away  everything.  "I  can't  conceive,  my  dear,  what 
you  're  talking  about ! " 

Charlotte  promptly  rose  then,  as  might  be,  to  meet 
it,  and  her  colour  for  the  first  time  perceptibly 
heightened.  She  looked,  for  the  minute,  as  her  com 
panion  had  looked  —  as  if  twenty  protests,  blocking 
each  other's  way,  had  surged  up  within  her.  But  when 
Charlotte  had  to  make  a  selection  it  was  always  the 
most  effective  possible.  It  was  happy  now,  above  all, 
for  being  made  not  in  anger  but  in  sorrow.  "  You  give 
me  up  then  ? " 

"  Give  you  up  —  ? " 

"You  forsake  me  at  the  hour  of  my  life  when  it 
seems  to  me  I  most  deserve  a  friend's  loyalty  ?  If  you 
do  you  're  not  just,  Fanny;  you  're  even,  I  think,"  she 
went  on,  "rather  cruel;  and  it's  least  of  all  worthy 
of  you  to  seem  to  wish  to  quarrel  with  me  in  order  to 
cover  your  desertion."  She  spoke,  at  the  same  time, 
with  the  noblest  moderation  of  tone,  and  the  image 
of  high  pale  lighted  disappointment  she  meanwhile 
presented,  as  of  a  creature  patient  and  lonely  in  her 
splendour,  was  an  impression  so  firmly  imposed  that 
she  could  fill  her  measure  to  the  brim  and  yet  enjoy 
the  last  word,  as  it  is  called  in  such  cases,  with  a  per- 

263 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

faction  void  of  any  vulgarity  of  triumph.  She  merely 
completed,  for  truth's  sake,  her  demonstration. 
"What's  a  quarrel  with  me  but  a  quarrel  with  my 
right  to  recognise  the  conditions  of  my  bargain  ?  But 
I  can  carry  them  out  alone,"  she  said  as  she  turned 
away.  She  turned  to  meet  the  Ambassador  and  the 
Prince,  who,  their  colloquy  with  their  Field-Marshal 
ended,  were  now  at  hand  and  had  already,  between 
them,  she  was  aware,  addressed  her  a  remark  that 
failed  to  penetrate  the  golden  glow  in  which  her  intel 
ligence  was  temporarily  bathed.  She  had  made  her 
point,  the  point  she  had  foreseen  she  must  make ;  she 
had  made  it  thoroughly  and  once  for  all,  so  that  no 
more  making  was  required;  and  her  success  was  re 
flected  in  the  faces  of  the  two  men  of  distinction  before 
her,  unmistakeably  moved  to  admiration  by  her  excep 
tional  radiance.  She  at  first  but  watched  this  reflex 
ion,  taking  no  note  of  any  less  adequate  form  of  it 
possibly  presented  by  poor  Fanny  —  poor  Fanny  left 
to  stare  at  her  incurred  "score,"  chalked  up  in  so 
few  strokes  on  the  wall ;  then  she  made  out  what  the 
Ambassador  was  saying  in  French,  what  he  was 
apparently  repeating  to  her. 

"A  desire  for  your  presence,  Madame,  has  been 
expressed  en  tres-haut  lieu,  and  I  Ve  let  myself  in  for 
the  responsibility,  to  say  nothing  of  the  honour,  of 
seeing,  as  the  most  respectful  of  your  friends,  that 
so  august  an  impatience  is  not  kept  waiting."  The 
greatest  possible  Personage  had  in  short,  according  to 
the  odd  formula  of  societies  subject  to  the  greatest 
personages  possible,  "sent  for"  her,  and  she  asked,  in 
her  surprise,  "What  in  the  world  does  he  want  to  do 

264 


THE  PRINCE 

to  me  ? "  only  to  know,  without  looking,  that  Fanny's 
bewilderment  was  called  to  a  still  larger  application, 
and  to  hear  the  Prince  say  with  authority,  indeed  with 
a  certain  prompt  dryness:  "You  must  go  immedi 
ately  —  it 's  a  summons."  The  Ambassador,  using 
authority  as  well,  had  already  somehow  possessed 
himself  of  her  hand,  which  he  drew  into  his  arm,  and 
she  was  further  conscious  as  she  went  off  with  him 
that,  though  still  speaking  for  her  benefit,  Amerigo 
had  turned  to  Fanny  Assingham.  He  would  explain 
afterwards  —  besides  which  she  would  understand  for 
herself.  To  Fanny,  however,  he  had  laughed  —  as  a 
mark,  it  seemed,  that  for  this  infallible  friend  no  ex 
planation  at  all  would  be  necessary. 


II 


IT  may  be  recorded  none  the  less  that  the  Prince  was 
the  next  moment  to  see  how  little  any  such  assump 
tion  was  founded.  Alone  with  him  now  Mrs.  Assing- 
ham  was  incorruptible.  "They  send  for  Charlotte 
through  you?" 

"No,  my  dear;  as  you  see,  through  the  Ambassa 
dor/' 

"Ah  but  the  Ambassador  and  you,  for  the  last 
quarter  of  an  hour,  have  been  for  them  as  one.  He 's 
your  ambassador."  It  may  indeed  be  further  men 
tioned  that  the  more  Fanny  looked  at  it  the  more  she 
saw  in  it.  "They've  connected  her  with  you  —  she's 
treated  as  your  appendage." 

"Oh  my  'appendage,'"  the  Prince  amusedly  ex 
claimed —  "cara  mia,  what  a  name!  She's  treated 
rather  say  as  my  ornament  and  my  glory.  And  it's 
so  remarkable  a  case  for  a  mother-in-law  that  you 
surely  can't  find  fault  with  it." 

"You've  ornaments  enough,  it  seems  to  me  —  as 
you  've  certainly  glories  enough  —  without  her.  And 
she's  not  the  least  little  bit,"  Mrs.  Assingham  ob 
served,  "your  mother-in-law.  In  such  a  matter  a 
shade  of  difference  is  enormous.  She's  no  relation 
to  you  whatever,  and  if  she 's  known  in  high  quarters 
but  as  going  about  with  you,  then  —  then  — !"  She 
failed,  however,  as  from  positive  intensity  of  vision. 

"Then,  then  what?"  he  asked  with  perfect  good 
nature. 

266 


THE  PRINCE 

"She  had  better  in  such  a  case  not  be  known  at  all." 
"But  I  assure  you  I  never,  just  now,  so  much  as 
mentioned  her.  Do  you  suppose  I  asked  them,"  said 
the  young  man,  still  amused,  "if  they  did  n't  want  to 
see  her  ?  You  surely  don't  need  to  be  shown  that 
Charlotte  speaks  for  herself —  that  she  does  so  above 
all  on  such  an  occasion  as  this  and  looking  as  she 
does  to-night.  How,  so  looking,  can  she  pass  un 
noticed  ?  How  can  she  not  have  '  success '  ?  Besides," 
he  added  while  she  watched  his  face,  letting  him  say 
what  he  would,  as  if  but  wanting  to  see  how  he  would 
say  it,  "  besides,  there  is  always  the  fact  that  we  're  of 
the  same  connexion,  of —  what  is  your  word  ?  —  the 
same  'concern.'  We  're  certainly  not,  with  the  relation 
of  our  respective  sposi,  simply  formal  acquaintances. 
We  're  in  the  same  boat "  —  and  the  Prince  smiled 
with  a  candour  that  added  an  accent  to  his  emphasis. 
Fanny  Assingham  was  full  of  the  special  sense  of 
his  manner:  it  caused  her  to  turn  for  a  moment's 
refuge  to  a  corner  of  her  general  consciousness  in 
which  she  could  say  to  herself  that  she  was  glad  she 
was  n't  in  love  with  such  a  man.  As  with  Charlotte, 
just  before,  she  was  embarrassed  by  the  difference 
between  what  she  took  in  and  what  she  could  say, 
what  she  felt  and  what  she  could  show.  "It  only 
appears  to  me  of  great  importance  that  —  now  that 
you  all  seem  more  settled  here  —  Charlotte  should 
be  known,  for  any  presentation,  any  further  circula 
tion  or  introduction,  as  in  particular  her  husband's 
wife;  known  in  the  least  possible  degree  as  anything 
else.  I  don't  know  what  you  mean  by  the '  same '  boat. 
Charlotte  is  naturally  in  Mr.  Verver's  boat." 

267 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"And  pray  am  /  not  in  Mr.  Verver's  boat  too  ?  Why 
but  for  Mr.  Verver's  boat  I  should  have  been  by  this 
time  "  —  and  his  quick  Italian  gesture,  an  expressive 
direction  and  motion  of  his  forefinger,  pointed  to 
deepest  depths  —  "away  down,  down,  down."  She 
knew  of  course  what  he  meant  —  how  it  had  taken 
his  father-in-law's  great  fortune,  and  taken  no  small 
slice,  to  surround  him  with  an  element  in  which,  all 
too  fatally  weighted  as  he  had  originally  been,  he 
could  pecuniarily  float;  and  with  this  reminder  other 
things  came  to  her  —  how  strange  it  was  that,  with  all 
allowance  for  their  merit,  it  should  befall  some  people 
to  be  so  inordinately  valued,  quoted,  as  they  said  in 
the  stock-market,  so  high,  and  how  still  stranger  per 
haps  that  there  should  be  cases  in  which,  for  some 
reason,  one  did  n't  mind  the  so  frequently  marked 
absence  in  them  of  the  purpose  really  to  represent 
their  price.  She  was  thinking,  feeling,  at  any  rate,  for 
herself;  she  was  thinking  that  the  pleasure  she  could 
take  in  this  specimen  of  the  class  did  n't  suffer  from 
his  consent  to  be  merely  made  buoyant:  partly  be 
cause  it  was  one  of  those  pleasures  (he  inspired  them) 
that,  by  their  nature,  could  n't  suffer,  to  whatever 
proof  they  were  put;  and  partly  because,  besides,  he 
after  all  visibly  had  on  his  conscience  some  sort  of 
return  for  services  rendered.  He  was  a  huge  expense 
assuredly  —  but  it  had  been  up  to  now  her  conviction 
that  his  idea  was  to  behave  beautifully  enough  to 
make  the  beauty  well-nigh  an  equivalent.  And  that 
he  had  carried  out  his  idea,  carried  it  out  by  contin 
uing  to  lead  the  life,  to  breathe  the  air,  very  nearly  to 
think  the  thoughts,  that  best  suited  his  wife  and  her 

268 


THE  PRINCE 

father  —  this  she  had  till  lately  enjoyed  the  comfort 
of  so  distinctly  perceiving  as  to  have  even  been  moved 
more  than  once  to  express  to  him  the  happiness  it 
gave  her.  He  had  that  in  his  favour  as  against  other 
matters;  yet  it  discouraged  her  too,  and  rather  oddly, 
that  he  should  so  keep  moving,  and  be  able  to  show 
her  that  he  moved,  on  the  firm  ground  of  the  truth. 
His  acknowledgement  of  obligation  was  far  from  un 
important,  but  she  could  find  in  his  grasp  of  the  real 
itself  a  kind  of  ominous  intimation.  The  intimation 
appeared  to  peep  at  her  even  out  of  his  next  word, 
lightly  as  he  produced  it. 

"Is  n't  it  rather  as  if  we  had,  Charlotte  and  I,  for 
bringing  us  together,  a  benefactor  in  common  ? "  And 
the  effect  for  his  good  friend  was  still  further  to  be 
deepened.  "I  somehow  feel  half  the  time  as  if  he  were 
her  father-in-law  too.  It 's  as  if  he  had  saved  us  both 
• —  which  is  a  fact  in  our  lives,  or  at  any  rate  in  our 
hearts,  to  make  of  itself  a  link.  Don't  you  remember  " 
—  he  kept  it  up  —  "  how,  the  day  she  suddenly  turned 
up  for  you,  just  before  my  wedding,  we  so  frankly 
and  funnily  talked,  in  her  presence,  of  the  advisability 
for  her  of  some  good  marriage  ? "  And  then  as  his 
friend's  face,  in  her  extremity,  quite  again  as  with 
Charlotte,  but  continued  to  fly  the  black  flag  of  gen 
eral  repudiation:  "Well,  we  really  began  then,  as  it 
seems  to  me,  the  work  of  placing  her  where  she  is. 
We  were  wholly  right  —  and  so  was  she.  That  it  was 
exactly  the  thing  is  shown  by  its  success.  We  recom 
mended  a  good  marriage  at  almost  any  price,  so  to 
speak,  and,  taking  us  at  our  word,  she  has  made  the 
very  best.  That  was  really  what  we  meant,  was  n't 

269 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

it  ?  Only  —  what  she  has  got  —  something  thoroughly 
good.  It  would  be  difficult,  it  seems  to  me,  for  her  to 
have  anything  better  —  once  you  allow  her  the  way 
it's  to  be  taken.  Of  course  if  you  don't  allow  her  that 
the  case  is  different.  Her  offset  is  a  certain  decent 
freedom  —  which  I  judge  she  '11  be  quite  contented 
with.  You  may  say  that  will  be  very  good  of  her,  but 
she  strikes  me  as  perfectly  humble  about  it.  She  pro 
poses  neither  to  claim  it  nor  to  use  it  with  any  sort  of 
retentissement.  She  would  enjoy  it,  I  think,  quite  as 
quietly  as  it  might  be  given.  The  'boat,'  you  see "  — 
the  Prince  explained  it  no  less  considerately  and 
lucidly  —  "is  a  good  deal  tied  up  at  the  dock,  or 
anchored,  if  you  like,  out  in  the  stream.  I  have  to 
jump  out  from  time  to  time  to  stretch  my  legs,  and 
you  '11  probably  perceive,  if  you  give  it  your  attention, 
that  Charlotte  really  can't  help  occasionally  doing  the 
same.  It  is  n't  even  a  question,  sometimes,  of  one's 
getting  to  the  dock  —  one  has  to  take  a  header  and 
splash  about  in  the  water.  Call  our  having  remained 
here  together  to-night,  call  the  accident  of  my  having 
put  them,  put  our  illustrious  friends  there,  on  my 
companion's  track  —  for  I  grant  you  this  as  a  prac 
tical  result  of  our  combination  —  call  the  whole  thing 
one  of  the  harmless  little  plunges,  off  the  deck,  in 
evitable  for  each  of  us.  Why  not  take  them,  when  they 
occur,  as  inevitable  —  and  above  all  as  not  endanger 
ing  life  or  limb  ?  We  shan't  drown,  we  shan't  sink  — 
at  least  I  can  answer  for  myself.  Mrs.  Verver  too 
moreover  —  do  her  the  justice  —  visibly  knows  how 
to  swim." 

He  could  easily  go  on,  for  she  did  n't  interrupt  him ; 
270 


THE   PRINCE 

Fanny  felt  now  that  she  would  n't  have  interrupted 
him  for  the  world.  She  found  his  eloquence  precious; 
there  was  n't  a  drop  of  it  that  she  did  n't  in  a  manner 
catch,  as  it  came,  for  immediate  bottling,  for  future 
preservation.  The  crystal  flash  of  her  innermost  at 
tention  really  received  it  on  the  spot,  and  she  had 
even  already  the  vision  of  how,  in  the  snug  laboratory 
of  her  afterthought,  she  should  be  able  chemically  to 
analyse  it.  There  were  moments  positively,  still 
beyond  this,  when,  with  the  meeting  of  their  eyes, 
something  as  yet  unnameable  came  out  for  her  in  his 
look,  when  something  strange  and  subtle  and  at  vari 
ance  with  his  words,  something  that  gave  them  away, 
glimmered  deep  down,  as  an  appeal,  almost  an  in 
credible  one,  to  her  finer  comprehension.  What,  in 
conceivably,  was  it  like  ?  Was  n't  it,  however  gross 
such  a  rendering  of  anything  so  occult,  fairly  like  a 
quintessential  wink,  a  hint  of  the  possibility  of  their 
really  treating  their  subject  —  of  course  on  some 
better  occasion  —  and  thereby,  as  well,  finding  it 
much  more  interesting  ?  If  this  far  red  spark,  which 
might  have  been  figured  by  her  mind  as  the  head 
light  of  an  approaching  train  seen  through  the  length 
of  a  tunnel,  was  not,  on  her  side,  an  ignis  fatuus,  a 
mere  subjective  phenomenon,  it  twinkled  there  at  the 
direct  expense  of  what  the  Prince  was  inviting  her  to 
understand.  Meanwhile  too,  however,  and  unmis- 
takeably,  the  real  treatment  of  their  subject  did,  at  a 
given  moment,  sound.  This  was  when  he  proceeded, 
with  just  the  same  perfect  possession  of  his  thought  — 
on  the  manner  of  which  he  could  n't  have  improved 
• — to  complete  his  successful  simile  by  another,  in  fact 

271 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

by  just  the  supreme,  touch,  the  touch  for  which  it  had 
till  now  been  waiting.  "  For  Mrs.  Verver  to  be  known 
to  people  so  intensely  and  exclusively  as  her  husband's 
wife  something  is  wanted  that,  you  know,  they 
have  n't  exactly  got.  He  should  manage  to  be  known 
—  or  at  least  to  be  seen  —  a  little  more  as  his  wife's 
husband.  You  surely  must  by  this  time  have  seen  for 
yourself  that  he  has  his  own  habits  and  his  own  ways, 
and  that  he  makes,  more  and  more  —  as  of  course  he 
has  a  perfect  right  to  do  —  his  own  discriminations. 
He's  so  perfect,  so  ideal  a  father,  and,  doubtless 
largely  by  that  very  fact,  so  generous,  so  comfortable, 
so  admirable  a  father-in-law,  that  I  should  really  feel 
it  base  to  avail  myself  of  any  standpoint  whatever  to 
criticise  him.  To  you  nevertheless  I  may  make  just 
one  remark ;  for  you  're  not  stupid  —  you  always 
understand  so  blessedly  what  one  means." 

He  paused  an  instant,  as  if  even  this  one  remark 
might  be  difficult  for  him  should  she  give  no  sign  of 
encouraging  him  to  produce  it.  Nothing  would  have 
induced  her,  however,  to  encourage  him ;  she  was  now 
conscious  of  having  never  in  her  life  stood  so  still  or 
sat,  inwardly,  as  it  were,  so  tight;  she  felt  like  the 
horse  of  the  adage,  brought  —  and  brought  by  her 
own  fault  —  to  the  water,  but  strong,  for  the  occasion, 
in  the  one  fact  that  she  could  n't  be  forced  to  drink. 
Invited,  in  other  words,  to  understand,  she  held  her 
breath  for  fear  of  showing  she  did,  and  this  for  the 
excellent  reason  that  she  was  at  last  fairly  afraid  to. 
It  was  sharp  for  her,  at  the  same  time,  that  she  was 
certain,  in  advance,  of  his  remark;  that  she  heard  it 
before  it  had  sounded,  that  she  already  tasted  in  fine 

272 


THE   PRINCE 

the  bitterness  it  would  have  for  her  special  sensibility. 
But  her  companion,  from  an  inward  and  different 
need  of  his  own,  was  presently  not  deterred  by  her 
silence.  "What  I  really  don't  see  is  why,  from  his 
own  point  of  view  —  given,  that  is,  his  conditions,  so 
fortunate  as  they  stood  —  he  should  have  wished  to 
marry  at  all."  There  it  was  then  —  exactly  what  she 
knew  would  come,  and  exactly,  for  reasons  that 
seemed  now  to  thump  at  her  heart,  as  distressing  to 
her.  Yet  she  was  resolved  meanwhile  not  to  suffer, 
as  they  used  to  say  of  the  martyrs,  then  and  there ;  not 
to  suffer,  odiously,  helplessly,  in  public  —  which  could 
be  prevented  but  by  her  breaking  off  with  whatever 
inconsequence;  by  her  treating  their  discussion  as 
ended  and  getting  away.  She  suddenly  wanted  to  go 
home  —  much  as  she  had  wanted,  an  hour  or  two 
before,  to  come.  She  wanted  to  leave  well  behind  her 
both  her  question  and  the  couple  in  whom  it  had 
abruptly  taken  such  vivid  form  —  but  it  was  dreadful 
to  have  the  appearance  of  disconcerted  flight.  Dis 
cussion  had  of  itself,  to  her  sense,  become  danger  — 
such  light,  as  from  open  crevices,  it  let  in;  and  the 
overt  recognition  of  danger  was  worse  than  anything 
else.  The  worst  in  fact  came  while  she  was  thinking 
how  she  could  retreat  and  still  not  overtly  recognise. 
Her  face  had  betrayed  her  trouble,  and  with  that  she 
was  lost.  "  I  'm  afraid,  however,"  the  Prince  said, 
"that  I,  for  some  reason,  distress  you  —  for  which  I 
beg  your  pardon.  We  've  always  talked  so  well  to 
gether  —  it  has  been,  from  the  beginning,  the  greatest 
pull  for  me."  Nothing  so  much  as  such  a  tone  could 
have  quickened  her  collapse;  she  felt  he  had  her  now 

273 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

at  his  mercy,  and  he  showed,  as  he  went  on,  that  he 
knew  it.  "We  shall  talk  again,  all  the  same,  better 
than  ever  —  I  depend  on  it  too  much.  Don't  you 
remember  what  I  told  you  so  definitely  one  day  before 
my  marriage  ?  —  that,  moving  as  I  did  in  so  many 
ways  among  new  things,  mysteries,  conditions,  expec 
tations,  assumptions  different  from  any  I  had  known, 
I  looked  to  you,  as  my  original  sponsor,  my  fairy 
godmother,  to  see  me  through.  I  beg  you  to  believe," 
he  added,  "that  I  look  to  you  yet." 

His  very  insistence  had  fortunately  the  next  mo 
ment  affected  her  as  bringing  her  help;  with  which 
at  least  she  could  hold  up  her  head  to  speak.  "Ah, 
you  are  through  —  you  were  through  long  ago.  Or 
if  you  are  n't  you  ought  to  be." 

"  Well  then  if  I  ought  to  be  it 's  all  the  more  reason 
why  you  should  continue  to  help  me.  Because  very 
distinctly  I  assure  you  I  'm  not.  The  new  things  — 
or  ever  so  many  of  them  —  are  still  for  me  new  things; 
the  mysteries  and  expectations  and  assumptions  still 
contain  an  immense  element  that  I  've  failed  to  puzzle 
out.  As  we've  happened  so  luckily  to  find  ourselves 
again  really  taking  hold  together,  you  must  let  me, 
as  soon  as  possible,  come  to  see  you;  you  must  give 
me  a  good  kind  hour.  If  you  refuse  it  me  "  —  and  he 
addressed  himself  to  her  continued  reserve  —  "I 
shall  feel  that  you  deny,  with  a  stony  stare,  your 
responsibility." 

At  this,  as  from  a  sudden  shake,  her  reserve  proved 
a  weak  vessel.  She  could  bear  her  own,  her  private 
reference  to  the  weight  on  her  mind,  but  the  touch  of 
another  hand  made  it  too  horribly  press.  "Oh  I  deny 

274 


THE   PRINCE 

responsibility  —  to  you.  So  far  as  I  ever  had  it  I  Ve 
done  with  it." 

He  had  been  all  the  while  beautifully  smiling;  but 
she  made  his  look  now  penetrate  her  again  more. 
"As  to  whom  then  do  you  confess  it?" 

"Ah  mio  caro,  that's  —  if  to  any  one  —  my  own 
business!" 

He  continued  to  look  at  her  hard.  "You  give  me 
up  then  ? " 

It  was  what  Charlotte  had  asked  her  ten  minutes 
before,  and  its  coming  from  him  so  much  in  the  same 
way  shook  her  in  her  place.  She  was  on  the  point  of 
replying  "Do  you  and  she  agree  together  for  what 
you  '11  say  to  me  ? "  —  but  she  was  glad  afterwards  to 
have  checked  herself  in  time,  little  as  her  actual  an 
swer  had  perhaps  bettered  it.  "  I  think  I  don't  know 
what  to  make  of  you." 

"You  must  receive  me  at  least,"  he  said. 

"  Oh  please  not  till  I  'm  ready  for  you ! "  —  and 
though  she  found  a  laugh  for  it  she  had  to  turn  away. 
She  had  never  turned  away  from  him  before,  and  it 
was  quite  positively  for  her  as  if  she  were  altogether 
afraid  of  him. 


Ill 


LATER  on,  when  their  hired  brougham  had,  with  the 
long  vociferation  that  tormented  her  impatience,  been 
extricated  from  the  endless  rank,  she  rolled  into  the 
London  night,  beside  her  husband,  as  into  a  sheltering 
darkness  where  she  could  muffle  herself  and  draw 
breath.  She  had  stood  for  the  previous  hour  in  a 
merciless  glare,  beaten  upon,  stared  out  of  counten 
ance,  it  fairly  seemed  to  her,  by  intimations  of  her 
mistake.  For  what  she  was  most  immediately  feeling 
was  that  she  had  in  the  past  been  active  for  these  peo 
ple  to  ends  that  were  now  bearing  fruit  and  that  might 
yet  bear  a  larger  crop.  She  but  brooded  at  first  in  her 
corner  of  the  carriage :  it  was  like  burying  her  exposed 
face,  a  face  too  helplessly  exposed,  in  the  cool  lap  of 
the  common  indifference,  of  the  dispeopled  streets, 
of  the  closed  shops  and  darkened  houses  seen  through 
the  window  of  the  brougham,  a  world  mercifully  un 
conscious  and  unreproachful.  It  would  n't,  like  the 
world  she  had  just  left,  know  sooner  or  later  what  she 
had  done,  or  would  know  it  only  if  the  final  conse 
quence  should  be  some  quite  overwhelming  publicity. 
She  fixed  this  possibility  itself  so  hard,  however,  for 
a  few  moments,  that  the  misery  of  her  fear  produced 
the  next  minute  a  reaction;  and  when  the  carriage 
happened,  while  it  grazed  a  turn,  to  catch  the  straight 
shaft  from  the  lamp  of  a  policeman  in  the  act  of  play 
ing  his  inquisitive  flash  over  an  opposite  house-front, 

276 


THE   PRINCE 

she  let  herself  wince  at  being  thus  incriminated  only 
that  she  might  protest,  not  less  quickly,  against  mere 
blind  terror.  It  had  become,  for  the  occasion  prepos 
terously  terror  —  of  which  she  must  shake  herself  free 
before  she  could  properly  measure  her  ground.  The 
perception  of  this  necessity  had  in  truth  soon  aided 
her;  since  she  found  on  trying  that,  lurid  as  her  pro 
spect  might  hover  there,  she  could  none  the  less  give  it 
no  name.  The  sense  of  seeing  was  strong  in  her,  but 
she  clutched  at  the  comfort  of  not  being  sure  of  what 
she  saw.  Not  to  know  what  it  would  represent  on  a 
longer  view  was  a  help,  in  turn,  to  not  making  out  that 
her  hands  were  embrued ;  since  if  she  had  stood  in  the 
position  of  a  producing  cause  she  should  surely  be  less 
vague  about  what  she  had  produced.  This,  further, 
in  its  way,  was  a  step  toward  reflecting  that  when 
one's  connexion  with  any  matter  was  too  indirect  to 
be  traced  it  might  be  described  also  as  too  slight  to  be 
deplored.  By  the  time  they  were  nearing  Cadogan 
Place  she  had  in  fact  recognised  that  she  could  n't  be 
so  curious  as  she  desired  without  arriving  at  some 
conviction  of  her  being  as  innocent.  But  there  had 
been  a  moment  in  the  dim  desert  of  Eaton  Square 
when  she  broke  into  speech. 

"It's  only  their  defending  themselves  so  much 
more  than  they  need  —  it's  only  that  that  makes  me 
wonder.  It's  their  having  so  remarkably  much  to  say 
for  themselves." 

Her  husband  had  as  usual  lighted  his  cigar,  re 
maining  apparently  as  busy  with  it  as  she  with  her 
agitation.  "You  mean  it  makes  you  feel  that  you  have 
nothing  ? "  To  which,  as  she  failed  to  answer,  the 

277 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

Colonel  added:  "What  in  the  world  did  you  ever 
suppose  was  going  to  happen  ?  The  man 's  in  a  posi 
tion  in  which  he  has  nothing  in  life  to  do." 

Her  silence  seemed  to  characterise  this  statement 
as  superficial,  and  her  thoughts,  as  always  in  her  hus 
band's  company,  pursued  an  independent  course.  He 
made  her,  when  they  were  together,  talk,  but  as  if 
for  some  other  person;  who  was  in  fact  for  the  most 
part  herself.  Yet  she  addressed  herself  with  him  as 
she  could  never  have  done  without  him.  "He  has 
behaved  beautifully  —  he  did  from  the  first.  I  Ve 
thought  it  all  along  wonderful  of  him;  and  I've 
more  than  once  when  I  've  had  a  chance  told  him  so. 
Therefore,  therefore  — ! "  But  it  died  away  as  she 
mused. 

"Therefore  he  has  a  right,  for  a  change,  to  kick  up 
his  heels?" 

"  It  is  n't  a  question  of  course  however,"  she  undi- 
vertedly  went  on,  "of  their  behaving  beautifully  apart. 
It 's  a  question  of  their  doing  as  they  should  when  to 
gether  —  which  is  another  matter." 

"And  how  do  you  think  then,"  the  Colonel  asked 
with  interest,  "that  when  together  they  should  do? 
The  less  they  do,  one  would  say,  the  better  —  if  you 
see  so  much  in  it." 

His  wife  appeared  at  this  to  hear  him.  "I  don't 
see  in  it  what  you'd  see.  And  don't,  my  dear,"  she 
further  answered,  "think  it  necessary  to  be  horrid  or 
low  about  them.  They're  the  last  people  really  to 
make  anything  of  that  sort  come  in  right." 

"I'm  surely  never  horrid  or  low,"  he  returned, 
"about  any  one  but  my  extravagant  wife.  I  can  do 

278 


THE  PRINCE 

with  all  our  friends  —  as  I  see  them  myself:  what  I 
can't  do  with  is  the  figures  you  make  of  them.  And 
when  you  take  to  adding  your  figures  up  — ! "  But  he 
exhaled  it  again  in  smoke. 

"My  additions  don't  matter  when  you've  not  to 
pay  the  bill."  With  which  her  meditation  again  bore 
her  through  the  air.  "The  great  thing  was  that  when 
it  so  suddenly  came  up  for  her  he  was  n't  afraid.  If 
he  had  been  afraid  he  could  perfectly  have  prevented 
it.  And  if  I  had  seen  he  was  —  if  I  had  n't  seen  he 
was  n't  —  so,"  said  Mrs.  Assingham,  "could  I.  So," 
she  declared,  "would  I.  It's  perfectly  true,"  she  went 
on  —  "it  was  too  good  a  thing  for  her,  such  a  chance 
in  life,  not  to  be  accepted.  And  I  liked  his  not  keeping 
her  out  of  it  merely  from  a  fear  of  his  own  nature. 
It  was  so  wonderful  it  should  come  to  her.  The  only 
thing  would  have  been  if  Charlotte  herself  could  n't 
have  faced  it.  Then  —  if  she  had  n't  had  confidence 

—  we  might   have    talked.    But  she  had  it  to  any 
amount." 

"  Did  you  ask  her  how  much  ? "  Bob  Assingham 
patiently  growled. 

He  had  put  the  question  with  no  more  than  his 
usual  modest  hope  of  reward,  but  he  had  pressed  this 
time  the  sharpest  spring  of  response.  "Never,  never 

—  it  was  n't  a  time  to  'ask.'   Asking  is  suggesting  — 
and  it  was  n't  a  time  to  suggest.    One  had  to  make 
up  one's  mind,  as  quietly  as  possible,  by  what  one 
could  judge.    And  I  judge,  as  I  say,  that  Charlotte 
felt  she  could  face  it.    For  which  she  struck  me  at 
the  time  as  —  for  so  proud  a  creature  —  almost  touch- 
ingly  grateful.   The  thing  I  should  never  forgive  her 

279 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

for  would  be  her  forgetting  to  whom  it  is  her  thanks 
have  remained  most  due." 

"That  is  to  Mrs.  Assingham  ?" 

She  said  nothing  for  a  little  —  there  were  after  all 
alternatives.  "  Maggie  herself  of  course  —  astonish 
ing  little  Maggie." 

"  Is  Maggie  then  astonishing  too  ? "  —  and  he 
gloomed  out  of  his  window. 

His  wife,  on  her  side  now,  as  they  rolled,  projected 
the  same  look.  "  I  'm  not  sure  I  don't  begin  to  see 
more  in  her  than  —  dear  little  person  as  I  've  always 
thought  —  I  ever  supposed  there  was.  I  'm  not  sure 
that,  putting  a  good  many  things  together,  I  'm  not 
beginning  to  make  her  out  rather  extraordinary." 

"You  certainly  will  if  you  can,"  the  Colonel 
resignedly  remarked. 

Again  his  companion  said  nothing;  then  again  she 
broke  out.  "  In  fact  —  I  do  begin  to  feel  it  —  Mag 
gie  's  the  great  comfort.  I  'm  getting  hold  of  it.  It  will 
be  she  who'll  see  us  through.  In  fact  she'll  have  to. 
And  she'll  be  able." 

Touch  by  touch  her  meditation  had  completed  it, 
but  with  a  cumulative  effect  for  her  husband's  general 
sense  of  her  method  that  caused  him  to  overflow, 
whimsically  enough,  in  his  corner,  into  an  ejaculation 
now  frequent  on  his  lips  for  the  relief  that,  especially 
in  communion  like  the  present,  it  gave  him,  and  that 
Fanny  had  critically  traced  to  the  quaint  example, 
the  aboriginal  homeliness,  still  so  delightful,  of  Mr. 
Verver.  "Oh  Lordy,  Lordy!" 

"If  she  is,  however,"  Mrs.  Assingham  continued, 
"she'll  be  extraordinary  enough  —  and  that's  what 

280 


THE   PRINCE 

I  'm  thinking  of.  But  I  'm  not  indeed  so  very  sure," 
she  added,  "of  the  person  to  whom  Charlotte  ought  in 
decency  to  be  most  grateful.  I  mean  I  'm  not  sure  if 
that  person  is  even  almost  the  incredible  little  idealist 
who  has  made  her  his  wife." 

"  I  should  n't  think  you  would  be,  love,"  the  Colonel 
with  some  promptness  responded.  "Charlotte  as  the 
wife  of  an  incredible  little  idealist  — !"  His  cigar  in 
short  once  more  could  alone  express  it. 

"Yet  what  is  that,  when  one  thinks,  but  just  what 
she  struck  one  as  more  or  less  persuaded  that  she  her 
self  was  really  going  to  be  ? "  —  this  memory,  for  the 
full  view,  Fanny  found  herself  also  invoking. 

It  made  her  companion  in  truth  slightly  gape.  "An 
incredible  little  idealist  —  Charlotte  herself?" 

"And  she  was  sincere,"  his  wife  simply  proceeded 
"she  was  unmistakeably  sincere.  The  question  is 
only  how  much  is  left  of  it." 

"And  that  —  I  see  —  happens  to  be  another  of  the 
questions  you  can't  ask  her.  You  have  to  do  it  all," 
said  Bob  Assingham,  "as  if  you  were  playing  some 
game  with  its  rules  drawn  up  —  though  who 's  to  come 
down  on  you  if  you  break  them  I  don't  quite  see.  Or 
must  you  do  it  in  three  guesses  —  like  forfeits  on 
Christmas  Eve  ? "  To  which,  as  his  ribaldry  but 
dropped  from  her  he  further  added :  "  How  much  of 
anything  will  have  to  be  left  for  you  to  be  able  to  go 
on  with  it  ? " 

"I  shall  go  on,"  Fanny  Assingham  a  trifle  grimly 
declared,  "while  there's  a  scrap  as  big  as  your  nail. 
But  we  're  not  yet,  luckily,  reduced  only  to  that."  She 
had  another  pause,  holding  the  while  the  thread  of 

281 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

that  larger  perception  into  which  her  view  of  Mrs. 
Verver's  obligation  to  Maggie  had  suddenly  ex 
panded.  "Even  if  her  debt  wasn't  to  the  others  — 
even  then  it  ought  to  be  quite  sufficiently  to  the  Prince 
himself  to  keep  her  straight.  For  what  really  did  the 
Prince  do,"  she  asked  herself,  "but  generously  trust 
her  ?  What  did  he  do  but  take  it  from  her  that  if  she 
felt  herself  willing  it  was  because  she  felt  herself 
strong  ?  That  creates  for  her,  upon  my  word,"  Mrs. 
Assingham  pursued,  "a  duty  of  considering  him,  of 
honourably  repaying  his  trust,  which  —  well,  which 
she  '11  be  really  a  fiend  if  she  does  n't  make  the  law 
of  her  conduct.  I  mean  of  course  his  trust  that  she 
would  n't  interfere  with  him  —  expressed  by  his  hold 
ing  himself  quiet  at  the  critical  time." 

The  brougham  was  nearing  home,  and  it  was  per 
haps  this  sense  of  ebbing  opportunity  that  caused  the 
Colonel's  next  meditation  to  flower  in  a  fashion  almost 
surprising  to  his  wife.  They  were  united  for  the  most 
part  but  by  his  exhausted  patience;  so  that  indulgent 
despair  was  generally  at  the  best  his  note.  He  at 
present  however  actually  compromised  with  his 
despair  to  the  extent  of  practically  admitting  that  he 
had  followed  her  steps.  He  literally  asked  in  short 
an  intelligent,  well-nigh  a  sympathising,  question. 
"Gratitude  to  the  Prince  for  not  having  put  a  spoke 
in  her  wheel  —  that,  you  mean,  should,  taking  it  in  the 
right  way,  be  precisely  the  ballast  of  her  boat  ? " 

"Taking  it  in  the  right  way."  Fanny,  catching  at 
this  gleam,  emphasised  the  proviso. 

"  But  does  n't  it  rather  depend  on  what  she  may 
most  feel  to  be  the  right  way  ? " 

282 


THE   PRINCE 

"No  —  it  depends  on  nothing.  Because  there's 
only  one  way  —  for  duty  or  delicacy." 

"Oh  —  delicacy!"  Bob  Assingham  rather  crudely 
murmured. 

"  I  mean  the  highest  kind  —  moral.  Charlotte 's 
perfectly  capable  of  appreciating  that.  By  every  dic 
tate  of  moral  delicacy  she  must  let  him  alone." 

"Then  you've  made  up  your  mind  it's  all  poor 
Charlotte  ? "  he  asked  with  an  effect  of  abruptness. 

The  effect,  whether  intended  or  not,  reached  her  — 
brought  her  face  short  round.  It  was  a  touch  at  which 
she  again  lost  her  balance,  at  which  the  bottom  some 
how  dropped  out  of  her  recovered  comfort.  "Then 
you  've  made  up  yours  differently  ?  It  really  struck 
you  that  there  is  something  ? " 

The  movement  itself  apparently  made  him  once 
more  stand  off.  He  had  felt  on  his  nearer  approach 
the  high  temperature  of  the  question.  "  Perhaps  that 's 
just  what  she's  doing:  showing  him  how  much  she's 
letting  him  alone  —  pointing  it  out  to  him  from  day  to 
day." 

"  Did  she  point  it  out  by  waiting  for  him  to-night 
on  the  staircase  in  the  manner  you  described  to 
me?" 

"  I  really,  my  dear,  described  to  you  a  manner  ? "  — 
the  Colonel  clearly,  from  want  of  habit,  scarce 
recognised  himself  in  the  imputation. 

"  Yes  —  for  once  in  a  way ;  in  those  few  words  we 
had  after  you  had  watched  them  come  up  you  told  me 
something  of  what  you  had  seen.  You  did  n't  tell  me 
very  much  —  that  you  could  n't  for  your  life ;  but  I 
saw  for  myself  that,  strange  to  say,  you  had  received 

283 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

your  impression,  and  I  felt  therefore  that  there  must 
indeed  have  been  something  out  of  the  way  for  you 
so  to  betray  it."  She  was  fully  upon  him  now,  and 
she  confronted  him  with  his  proved  sensibility  to  the 
occasion  —  confronted  him  because  of  her  own  uneasy 
need  to  profit  by  it.  It  came  over  her  still  more  than 
at  the  time,  it  came  over  her  that  he  had  been  struck 
with  something,  even  he,  poor  dear  man;  and  that 
for  this  to  have  occurred  there  must  have  been  much 
to  be  struck  with.  She  tried  in  fact  to  corner  him,  to 
pack  him  insistently  down,  in  the  truth  of  his  plain 
vision,  the  very  plainness  of  which  was  its  value ;  for 
so  recorded,  she  felt,  none  of  it  would  escape  —  she 
should  have  it  at  hand  for  reference.  "Come,  my 
dear  —  you  thought  what  you  thought:  in  the  pre 
sence  of  what  you  saw  you  could  n't  resist  thinking. 
I  don't  ask  more  of  it  than  that.  And  your  idea  is 
worth,  this  time,  quite  as  much  as  any  of  mine  —  so 
that  you  can't  pretend  as  usual  that  mine  has  run 
away  with  me.  I  have  n't  caught  up  with  you.  I  stay 
where  I  am.  But  I  see,"  she  concluded,  "where  you 
are,  and  I  'm  much  obliged  to  you  for  letting  me.  You 
give  me  a  point  de  repere  outside  myself  —  which  is 
where  I  like  it.  Now  I  can  work  round  you." 

Their  conveyance,  as  she  spoke,  stopped  at  their 
door,  and  it  was  on  the  spot  another  fact  of  value  for 
her  that  her  husband,  though  seated  on  the  side  by 
which  they  must  alight,  made  no  movement.  They 
were  in  a  high  degree  votaries  of  the  latch-key,  so  that 
their  household  had  gone  to  bed;  and  as  they  were 
unaccompanied  by  a  footman  the  coachman  waited 
in  peace.  It  was  so  indeed  that  for  a  minute  Bob 

284 


THE  PRINCE 

Assingham  waited  —  conscious  of  a  reason  for  reply 
ing  to  this  address  otherwise  than  by  the  so  obvious 
method  of  turning  his  back.  He  did  n't  turn  his  face, 
but  stared  straight  before  him,  and  his  wife  had 
already  gathered  from  the  fact  of  his  not  moving  all 
the  proof  she  could  desire  —  proof,  that  is,  of  her  own 
contention.  She  knew  he  never  cared  what  she  said, 
and  his  neglect  of  his  chance  to  show  it  was  thereby 
the  more  eloquent.  "  Leave  it,"  he  at  last  remarked, 
"to  them." 

"'Leave  it' — ?"   She  wondered. 

"Let  them  alone.  They'll  manage." 

"They'll  manage,  you  mean,  to  do  everything  they 
want  ?  Ah  there  then  you  are ! " 

"They'll  manage  in  their  own  way,"  the  Colonel 
almost  cryptically  repeated. 

It  had  its  effect  for  her:  quite  apart  from  its  light 
on  the  familiar  phenomenon  of  her  husband's  indur 
ated  conscience,  it  gave  her  full  in  her  face  the  par 
ticular  evocation  of  which  she  had  made  him  guilty. 
It  was  wonderful,  truly  then,  the  evocation.  "So 
cleverly  —  that 's  your  idea  ?  —  that  no  one  will  be 
the  wiser  ?  It 's  your  idea  that  we  shall  have  done  all 
that's  required  of  us  if  we  simply  protect  them  ?" 

The  Colonel,  still  in  his  place,  declined  however  to 
be  drawn  into  a  statement  of  his  idea.  Statements 
were  too  much  like  theories,  in  which  one  lost  one's 
way;  he  only  knew  what  he  said,  and  what  he  said 
represented  the  limited  vibration  of  which  his  con 
firmed  old  toughness  had  been  capable.  Still,  none 
the  less,  he  had  his  point  to  make  —  for  which  he  took 
another  instant.  But  he  made  it  for  the  third  time  in 

285 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

the  same  fashion.    "They'll  manage  in  their  own 
way."  With  which  he  got  out. 

Oh  yes,  at  this,  for  his  companion,  it  had  indeed  its 
effect,  and  while  he  mounted  their  steps  she  but  stared, 
without  following  him,  at  his  opening  of  their  door. 
Their  hall  was  lighted,  and  as  he  stood  in  the  aperture 
looking  back  at  her,  his  tall  lean  figure  outlined  in 
darkness  and  with  his  crush-hat,  according  to  his 
wont,  worn  cavalierly,  rather  diabolically,  askew,  he 
seemed  to  prolong  the  sinister  emphasis  of  his  mean 
ing.  In  general,  on  these  returns,  he  came  back  for 
her  when  he  had  prepared  their  entrance;  so  that  it  was 
now  as  if  he  were  ashamed  to  face  her  in  closer  quar 
ters.  He  looked  at  her  across  the  interval,  and,  still 
in  her  seat,  weighing  his  charge,  she  felt  her  whole 
view  of  everything  flare  up.  Was  n't  it  simply  what 
had  been  written  in  the  Prince's  own  face  beneath 
what  he  was  saying  ?  —  did  n't  it  correspond  with  the 
mocking  presence  there  that  she  had  had  her  troubled 
glimpse  of?  Wasn't,  in  fine,  the  pledge  that  they 
would  "manage  in  their  own  way"  the  thing  he  had 
been  feeling  for  his  chance  to  invite  her  to  take  from 
him  ?  Her  husband's  tone  somehow  fitted  Amerigo's 
look  —  the  one  that  had  for  her  so  strangely  peeped 
from  behind  over  the  shoulder  of  the  one  in  front.  She 
had  n't  then  read  it  —  but  was  n't  she  reading  it  when 
she  now  saw  in  it  his  surmise  that  she  was  perhaps  to 
be  squared  ?  She  was  n't  to  be  squared,  and  while  she 
heard  her  companion  call  across  to  her  "Well,  what's 
the  matter?"  she  also  took  time  to  remind  herself 
that  she  had  decided  she  could  n't  be  frightened.  The 
"  matter  "  ?  —  why  it  was  sufficiently  the  matter,  on 

286 


all  this,  that  she  felt  a  little  sick.  For  it  was  n't  the 
Prince  she  had  been  prepared  to  regard  as  primarily 
the  shaky  one.  Shakiness  in  Charlotte  she  had  at  the 
most  perhaps  postulated  —  it  would  be,  she  somehow 
felt,  more  easy  to  deal  with.  Therefore  if  he  had  come 
so  far  it  was  a  different  pair  of  sleeves.  There  was  no 
thing  to  choose  between  them.  It  made  her  so  help 
less  that,  as  the  time  passed  without  her  alighting,  the 
Colonel  came  back  and  fairly  drew  her  forth;  after 
which,  on  the  pavement,  under  the  street-lamp,  their 
very  silence  might  have  been  the  mark  of  something 
grave  —  their  silence  eked  out  for  her  by  his  giving  her 
his  arm  and  their  then  crawling  up  their  steps  quite 
mildly  and  unitedly  together,  like  some  old  Darby  and 
Joan  who  have  had  a  disappointment.  It  almost  re 
sembled  a  return  from  a  funeral  —  unless  indeed  it 
resembled  more  the  hushed  approach  to  a  house  of 
mourning.  What  indeed  had  she  come  home  for  but 
to  inter,  as  decently  as  possible,  her  mistake  ? 


IV 


IT  appeared  thus  that  they  might  enjoy  together  ex 
traordinary  freedom,  the  two  friends,  from  the  mo 
ment  they  should  understand  their  position  aright. 
With  the  Prince  himself,  from  an  early  stage,  not 
unnaturally,  Charlotte  had  made  a  great  point  of  their 
so  understanding  it;  she  had  found  frequent  occasion 
to  describe  to  him  this  necessity,  and,  her  resignation 
tempered,  or  her  intelligence  at  least  quickened,  by 
irrepressible  irony,  she  applied  at  different  times  dif 
ferent  names  to  the  propriety  of  their  case.  The  won 
derful  thing  was  that  her  sense  of  propriety  had  been 
from  the  first  especially  alive  about  it.  There  were 
hours  when  she  spoke  of  their  taking  refuge  in  what 
she  called  the  commonest  tact  —  as  if  this  principle 
alone  would  suffice  to  light  their  way;  there  were 
others  when  it  might  have  seemed,  to  listen  to  her, 
that  their  course  would  demand  of  them  the  most 
anxious  study  and  the  most  independent,  not  to  say 
original,  interpretation  of  signs.  She  talked  now  as 
if  it  were  indicated  at  every  turn  by  finger-posts  of 
almost  ridiculous  prominence;  she  talked  again  as 
if  it  lurked  in  devious  ways  and  were  to  be  tracked 
through  bush  and  briar;  and  she  even  on  opportunity 
delivered  herself  in  the  sense  that,  as  their  situation 
was  unprecedented,  so  their  heaven  was  without  stars. 
' '  Do '  ? "  she  once  had  echoed  to  him  as  the  upshot  of 
passages  covertly,  though  briefly,  occurring  between 

288 


THE   PRINCE 

them  on  her  return  from  the  visit  to  America  that  had 
immediately  succeeded  her  marriage,  determined  for 
her  by  this  event  as  promptly  as  an  excursion  of  the 
like  strange  order  had  been  prescribed  in  his  own 
case.  "  Is  n't  the  immense,  the  really  quite  matchless 
beauty  of  our  position  that  we  have  to  'do'  nothing  in 
life  at  all  ?  —  nothing  except  the  usual  necessary 
everyday  thing  which  consists  in  one's  not  being  more 
of  a  fool  than  one  can  help.  That's  all  —  but  that's 
as  true  for  one  time  as  for  another.  There  has  been 
plenty  of  '  doing,'  and  there  will  doubtless  be  plenty 
still;  but  it's  all  theirs,  every  inch  of  it;  it's  all  a  mat 
ter  of  what  they've  done  to  us."  And  she  showed  how 
the  question  had  therefore  been  only  of  their  taking 
everything  as  everything  came,  and  all  as  quietly  as 
might  be.  Nothing  stranger  surely  had  ever  happened 
to  a  conscientious,  a  well-meaning,  a  perfectly  passive 
pair:  no  more  extraordinary  decree  had  ever  been 
launched  against  such  victims  than  this  of  forcing 
them  against  their  will  into  a  relation  of  mutual  close 
contact  that  they  had  done  everything  to  avoid. 

She  was  to  remember  not  a  little  meanwhile  the 
particular  prolonged  silent  look  with  which  the  Prince 
had  met  her  allusion  to  these  primary  efforts  at  escape. 
She  was  inwardly  to  dwell  on  the  element  of  the  un- 
uttered  that  her  tone  had  caused  to  play  up  into  his 
irresistible  eyes;  and  this  because  she  considered  with 
pride  and  joy  that  she  had  on  the  spot  disposed  of  the 
doubt,  the  question,  the  challenge,  or  whatever  else 
might  have  been,  that  such  a  look  could  convey.  He 
had  been  sufficiently  off  his  guard  to  show  some  little 
wonder  as  to  their  having  plotted  so  very  hard  against 

289 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

their  destiny,  and  she  knew  well  enough  of  course 
what  in  this  connexion  was  at  the  bottom  of  his 
thought,  and  what  would  have  sounded  out  more  or 
less  if  he  had  n't  happily  saved  himself  from  words. 
All  men  were  brutes  enough  to  catch  when  they  might 
at  such  chances  for  dissent  —  for  all  the  good  it 
really  did  them;  but  the  Prince's  distinction  was  in 
being  one  of  the  few  who  could  check  himself  before 
acting  on  the  impulse.  This,  obviously,  was  what 
counted  in  a  man  as  delicacy.  If  her  friend  had 
blurted  or  bungled  he  would  have  said,  in  his  simplic 
ity,  "Did  we  do  'everything  to  avoid'  it  when  we 
faced  your  remarkable  marriage  ? "  —  quite  hand 
somely  of  course  using  the  plural,  taking  his  share  of 
the  case,  by  way  of  a  tribute  of  memory  to  the  tele 
gram  she  had  received  from  him  in  Paris  after  Mr. 
Verver  had  dispatched  to  Rome  the  news  of  their 
engagement.  That  telegram,  that  acceptance  of  the 
prospect  proposed  to  them  —  an  acceptance  quite 
other  than  perfunctory  —  she  had  never  destroyed ; 
though  reserved  for  no  eyes  but  her  own  it  was  still 
carefully  reserved.  She  kept  it  in  a  safe  place  —  from 
which,  very  privately,  she  sometimes  took  it  out  to  read 
it  over.  "A  la  guerre  comme  a  la  guerre  then"  —  it 
had  been  couched  in  the  French  tongue.  "  We  must 
lead  our  lives  as  we  see  them  ;  but  I  am  charmed  with 
your  courage  and  almost  surprised  at  my  own"  The 
message  had  remained  ambiguous;  she  had  read  it  in 
more  lights  than  one ;  it  might  mean  that  even  without 
her  his  career  was  up-hill  work  for  him,  a  daily  fight 
ing-matter  on  behalf  of  a  good  appearance,  and  that 
thus  if  they  were  to  become  neighbours  again  the 

290 


THE   PRINCE 

event  would  compel  him  to  live  still  more  under  arms. 
It  might  mean  on  the  other  hand  that  he  found  he  was 
happy  enough,  and  that  accordingly,  so  far  as  she 
might  imagine  herself  a  danger,  she  was  to  think  of 
him  as  prepared  in  advance,  as  really  seasoned  and 
secure.  On  his  arrival  in  Paris  with  his  wife,  none  the 
less,  she  had  asked  for  no  explanation,  just  as  he  him 
self  had  n't  asked  if  the  document  were  still  in  her 
possession.  Such  an  enquiry,  everything  implied,  was 
beneath  him  —  just  as  it  was  beneath  herself  to  men 
tion  to  him  uninvited  that  she  had  instantly  and  in 
perfect  honesty  offered  to  show  the  telegram  to  Mr. 
Verver,  and  that  if  this  companion  had  but  said  the 
word  she  would  immediately  have  put  it  before  him. 
She  had  thereby  forborne  to  call  his  attention  to  her 
consciousness  that  such  an  exposure  would  in  all 
probability  at  once  have  dished  her  marriage;  that  all 
her  future  had  in  fact  for  the  moment  hung  by  the 
single  hair  of  Mr.  Verver's  delicacy  (as  she  supposed 
they  must  call  it) ;  and  that  her  position  in  the  matter 
of  responsibility  was  therefore  inattackably  straight. 
For  the  Prince  himself,  meanwhile,  time,  in  its 
measured  allowance,  had  originally  much  helped  him 
—  helped  him  in  the  sense  of  there  not  being  enough 
of  it  to  trip  him  up;  in  spite  of  which  it  was  just  this 
accessory  element  that  seemed  at  present,  with  won 
ders  of  patience,  to  lie  in  wait.  Time  had  begotten  at 
first,  more  than  anything  else,  separations,  delays  and 
intervals;  but  it  was  troublesomely  less  of  an  aid  from 
the  moment  it  began  so  to  abound  that  he  had  to  meet 
the  question  of  what  to  do  with  it.  Less  of  it  was  re 
quired  for  the  state  of  being  married  than  he  had  on 

291 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

the  whole  expected;  less,  strangely,  for  the  state  of 
being  married  even  as  he  was  married.  And  there  was 
a  logic  in  the  matter,  he  knew;  a  logic  that  but  gave 
this  truth  a  sort  of  solidity  of  evidence.  Mr.  Verver, 
decidedly,  helped  him  with  it  —  with  his  wedded 
condition ;  helped  him  really  so  much  that  it  made  all 
the  difference.  In  the  degree  in  which  he  rendered  it 
the  service  on  Mr.  Verver's  part  was  remarkable  — 
as  indeed  what  service,  from  the  first  of  their  meeting, 
had  n't  been  ?  He  was  living,  he  had  been  living 
these  four  or  five  years,  on  Mr.  Verver's  services :  a 
truth  scarcely  less  plain  if  he  dealt  with  them,  for 
appreciation,  one  by  one  than  if  he  poured  them  all 
together  into  the  general  pot  of  his  gratitude  and  let 
the  thing  simmer  to  a  nourishing  broth.  To  the  latter 
way  with  them  he  was  undoubtedly  most  disposed; 
yet  he  would  even  thus  now  and  again  pick  out  a  piece 
to  taste  on  its  own  merits.  Wondrous  at  such  hours 
could  seem  the  savour  of  the  particular  "treat,"  at 
his  father-in-law's  expense,  that  he  more  and  more 
struck  himself  as  enjoying.  He  had  needed  months 
and  months  to  arrive  at  a  full  appreciation  —  he 
could  n't  originally  have  given  off-hand  a  name  to  his 
deepest  obligation;  but  by  the  time  the  name  had 
flowered  in  his  mind  he  was  practically  living  at  the 
ease  guaranteed  him.  Mr.  Verver  then  in  a  word  took 
care  of  his  relation  to  Maggie  as  he  took  care,  and 
apparently  always  would,  of  everything  else.  He 
relieved  him  of  all  anxiety  about  his  married  life  in 
the  same  manner  in  which  he  relieved  him  on  the 
score  of  his  bank-account.  And  as  he  performed  the 
latter  office  by  communicating  with  the  bankers,  so 

292 


THE   PRINCE 

the  former  sprang  as  directly  from  his  good  under 
standing  with  his  daughter.  This  understanding  had, 
wonderfully  —  that  was  in  high  evidence  —  the  same 
deep  intimacy  as  the  commercial,  the  financial  asso 
ciation  founded,  far  down,  on  a  community  of  inter 
est.  And  the  correspondence,  for  the  Prince,  carried 
itself  out  in  identities  of  character  the  vision  of  which 
fortunately  rather  tended  to  amuse  than  to  —  as 
might  have  happened  —  irritate  him.  Those  people 
—  and  his  free  synthesis  lumped  together  capitalists 
and  bankers,  retired  men  of  business,  illustrious  col 
lectors,  American  fathers-in-law,  American  fathers, 
little  American  daughters,  little  American  wives  — 
those  people  were  of  the  same  large  lucky  group,  as 
one  might  say;  they  were  all  at  least  of  the  same  gen 
eral  species  and  had  the  same  general  instincts;  they 
hung  together,  they  passed  each  other  the  word,  they 
spoke  each  other's  language,  they  did  each  other 
"turns."  In  this  last  connexion  it  of  course  came  up 
for  our  young  man  at  a  given  moment  that  Maggie's 
relation  with  him  was  also  on  the  perceived  basis 
taken  care  of.  Which  was  in  fact  the  real  upshot  of 
the  matter.  It  was  a  "funny"  situation  —  that  is  it 
was  funny  just  as  it  stood.  Their  married  life  was  in 
question,  but  the  solution  was  n't  less  strikingly  before 
them.  It  was  all  right  for  himself  because  Mr.  Verver 
worked  it  so  for  Maggie's  comfort,  and  it  was  all  right 
for  Maggie  because  he  worked  it  so  for  her  husband's. 
The  fact  that  time  however  was  n't,  as  we  have 
said,  wholly  on  the  Prince's  side  might  have  shown 
for  particularly  true  one  dark  day  on  which,  by  an 
odd  but  not  unprecedented  chance,  the  reflexions 

293 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

just  noted  offered  themselves  as  his  main  recreation. 
They  alone,  it  appeared,  had  been  appointed  to  fill 
the  hours  for  him,  and  even  to  fill  the  great  square 
house  in  Portland  Place,  where  the  scale  of  one  of  the 
smaller  saloons  fitted  them  but  loosely.  He  had  looked 
into  this  room  on  the  chance  that  he  might  find  the 
Princess  at  tea ;  but  though  the  fireside  service  of  the 
repast  was  shiningly  present  the  mistress  of  the  table 
was  not,  and  he  had  waited  for  her,  if  waiting  it  could 
be  called,  while  he  measured  again  and  again  the 
stretch  of  polished  floor.  He  could  have  named  to  him 
self  no  pressing  reason  for  seeing  her  at  this  moment, 
and  her  not  coming  in,  as  the  half-hour  elapsed,  be 
came  in  fact  quite  positively,  however  perversely,  the 
circumstance  that  kept  him  on  the  spot.  Just  there,  he 
might  have  been  feeling,  just  there  he  could  best  take 
his  note.  This  observation  was  certainly  by  itself 
meagre  amusement  for  a  dreary  little  crisis;  but  his 
walk  to  and  fro,  and  in  particular  his  repeated  pause 
at  one  of  the  high  front  windows,  gave  each  of  the 
ebbing  minutes,  none  the  less,  after  a  time,  a  little 
more  of  the  quality  of  a  quickened  throb  of  the  spirit. 
These  throbs  scarce  expressed  however  the  impatience 
of  desire,  any  more  than  they  stood  for  sharp  disap 
pointment:  the  series  together  resembled  perhaps 
more  than  anything  else  those  fine  waves  of  clearness 
through  which,  for  a  watcher  of  the  east,  dawn  at  last 
trembles  into  rosy  day.  The  illumination  indeed  was 
all  for  the  mind,  the  prospect  revealed  by  it  a  mere  im 
mensity  of  the  world  of  thought;  the  material  outlook 
was  meantime  a  different  matter.  The  March  after 
noon,  judged  at  the  window,  had  blundered  back  into 

294 


THE  PRINCE 

autumn ;  it  had  been  raining  for  hours,  and  the  colour 
of  the  rain,  the  colour  of  the  air,  of  the  mud,  of  the 
opposite  houses,  of  life  altogether,  in  so  grim  a  joke, 
so  idiotic  a  masquerade,  was  an  unutterable  dirty 
brown.  There  was  at  first  even  for  the  young  man  no 
faint  flush  in  the  fact  of  the  direction  taken,  while 
he  happened  to  look  out,  by  a  slow-jogging  four- 
wheeled  cab  which,  awkwardly  deflecting  from  the 
middle  course,  at  the  apparent  instance  of  a  person 
within,  began  to  make  for  the  left-hand  pavement  and 
so  at  last,  under  further  instructions,  floundered  to  a 
full  stop  before  the  Prince's  windows.  The  person 
within,  alighting  with  an  easier  motion,  proved  to  be 
a  lady  who  left  the  vehicle  to  wait  and,  putting  up  no 
umbrella,  quickly  crossed  the  wet  interval  that  separ 
ated  her  from  the  house.  She  but  flitted  and  disap 
peared  ;  yet  the  Prince,  from  his  standpoint,  had  had 
time  to  recognise  her,  and  the  recognition  kept  him 
for  some  minutes  motionless. 

Charlotte  Stant,  at  such  an  hour,  in  a  shabby  four- 
wheeler  and  a  waterproof,  Charlotte  Stant  turning  up 
for  him  at  the  very  climax  of  his  special  inner  vision, 
was  an  apparition  charged  with  a  congruity  at  which 
he  stared  almost  as  if  it  had  been  a  violence.  The 
effect  of  her  coming  to  see  him,  him  only,  had,  as  he 
stood  waiting,  a  singular  intensity  —  though  after 
some  minutes  had  passed  the  certainty  of  this  began 
to  drop.  Perhaps  she  had  not  come,  or  had  come  only 
for  Maggie;  perhaps,  on  learning  below  that  the 
Princess  had  n't  returned,  she  was  merely  leaving  a 
message,  writing  a  word  on  a  card.  He  should  see  at 
any  rate,  and  just  yet,  controlling  himself,  would  do 

295 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

nothing.  This  thought  of  not  interfering  took  on  a  sud 
den  force  for  him;  she  would  doubtless  hear  he  was  at 
home,  but  he  would  let  her  visit  to  him  be  all  of  her 
own  choosing.  And  his  view  of  a  reason  for  leaving 
her  free  was  the  more  remarkable  that,  though  taking 
no  step,  he  yet  intensely  hoped.  The  harmony  of  her 
breaking  into  sight  while  the  superficial  conditions 
were  so  against  her  was  a  harmony  with  conditions 
that  were  far  from  superficial  and  that  gave,  for  his 
imagination,  an  extraordinary  value  to  her  presence. 
The  value  deepened  strangely  moreover  with  the 
rigour  of  his  own  attitude  —  with  the  fact  too  that, 
listening  hard,  he  neither  heard  the  house-door  close 
again  nor  saw  her  go  back  to  her  cab ;  and  it  had  risen 
to  a  climax  by  the  time  he  had  become  aware,  with  his 
quickened  sense,  that  she  had  followed  the  butler  up 
to  the  landing  from  which  his  room  opened.  If  any 
thing  could  further  then  have  added  to  it  the  renewed 
pause  outside,  as  if  she  had  said  to  the  man  "Wait 
a  moment!"  would  have  constituted  this  touch.  Yet 
when  the  man  had  shown  her  in,  had  advanced  to  the 
tea-table  to  light  the  lamp  under  the  kettle  and  had 
then  busied  himself  all  deliberately  with  the  fire,  she 
made  it  easy  for  her  host  to  drop  straight  from  any 
height  of  tension  and  to  meet  her  provisionally  on  the 
question  of  Maggie.  While  the  butler  remained  it  was 
Maggie  that  she  had  come  to  see  and  Maggie  that  — 
in  spite  of  this  attendant's  high  blankness  on  the  sub 
ject  of  all  possibilities  on  that  lady's  part  —  she  would 
cheerfully,  by  the  fire,  wait  for.  Directly  they  were 
alone  together,  however,  she  mounted,  with  the  whizz 
and  the  red  light  of  a  rocket,  from  the  form  to  the  fact, 

296 


saying  straight  out  as  she  stood  and  looked  at  him: 
"What  else,  my  dear,  what  in  the  world  else  can  we 
do?" 

It  was  as  if  he  then  knew  on  the  spot  why  he  had 
been  feeling  for  hours  in  such  fashion  —  as  if  he  in 
fact  knew  within  the  minute  things  he  had  n't  known 
even  while  she  was  panting,  from  the  effect  of  the 
staircase,  at  the  door  of  the  room.  He  knew  at  the 
same  time,  none  the  less,  that  she  knew  still  more  than 
he  —  in  the  sense,  that  is,  of  all  the  signs  and  portents 
that  might  count  for  them ;  and  his  vision  of  alterna 
tives  (he  could  scarce  say  what  to  call  them,  solutions, 
satisfactions)  opened  out  altogether  with  this  tangible 
truth  of  her  attitude  by  the  chimney-place,  the  way 
she  looked  at  him  as  through  the  gained  advantage  of 
it;  her  right  hand  resting  on  the  marble  and  her  left 
keeping  her  skirt  from  the  fire  while  she  held  out  a 
foot  to  dry.  He  could  n't  have  told  what  particular 
links  and  gaps  had  at  the  end  of  a  few  minutes  found 
themselves  renewed  and  bridged ;  for  he  remembered 
no  occasion  in  Rome  from  which  the  picture  could 
have  been  so  exactly  copied.  He  remembered,  that  is, 
none  of  her  coming  to  see  him  in  the  rain  while  a 
muddy  four-wheeler  waited  and  while,  though  having 
left  her  waterproof  downstairs,  she  was  yet  invested 
with  the  odd  eloquence  —  the  positive  picturesque- 
ness,  yes,  given  all  the  rest  of  the  matter  —  of  a  dull 
dress  and  a  black  Bowdlerised  hat  that  seemed  to 
make  a  point  of  insisting  on  their  time  of  life  and  their 
moral  intention,  the  hat's  and  the  frock's  own,  as  well 
as  on  the  irony  of  indifference  to  them  practically  play 
ing  in  her  so  handsome  rain-freshened  face.  The  sense 

297 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

of  the  past  revived  for  him  nevertheless  as  it  had  n't 
yet  done :  it  made  that  other  time  somehow  meet  the 
future  close,  interlocking  with  it,  before  his  watching 
eyes,  as  in  a  long  embrace  of  arms  and  lips,  and  so 
handling  and  hustling  the  present  that  this  poor 
quantity  scarce  retained  substance  enough,  scarce 
remained  sufficiently  there ,  to  be  wounded  or  shocked. 
What  had  happened  in  short  was  that  Charlotte 
and  he  had  by  a  single  turn  of  the  wrist  of  fate  —  "  led 
up  "  to  indeed,  no  doubt,  by  steps  and  stages  that  con 
scious  computation  had  missed  —  been  placed  face 
to  face  in  a  freedom  that  extraordinarily  partook  of 
ideal  perfection,  since  the  magic  web  had  spun  itself 
without  their  toil,  almost  without  their  touch.  Above 
all,  on  this  occasion,  once  more,  there  sounded  through 
their  safety,  as  an  undertone,  the  very  voice  he  had 
listened  to  on  the  eve  of  his  marriage  with  such  an 
other  sort  of  unrest.  Dimly,  again  and  again,  from 
that  period  on,  he  had  seemed  to  hear  it  tell  him  why 
it  kept  recurring;  but  it  phrased  the  large  music  now 
in  a  way  that  filled  the  room.  The  reason  was  —  into 
which  he  had  lived  quite  intimately  by  the  end  of  a 
quarter  of  an  hour  —  that  just  this  truth  of  their 
safety  offered  it  now  a  kind  of  unexampled  receptacle, 
letting  it  spread  and  spread,  but  at  the  same  time  elas- 
tically  enclosing  it,  banking  it  in,  for  softness,  as  with 
billows  of  eiderdown.  On  that  morning  in  the  Park 
there  had  been,  however  dissimulated,  doubt  and  dan 
ger,  whereas  the  tale  this  afternoon  was  taken  up  with 
a  highly  emphasised  confidence.  The  emphasis,  for 
their  general  comfort,  was  what  Charlotte  had  come  to 
apply;  inasmuch  as,  though  it  was  not  what  she 

208 


THE  PRINCE 

definitely  began  with,  it  had  soon  irrepressibly  shaped 
itself.  It  was  the  meaning  of  the  question  she  had  put 
to  him  as  soon  as  they  were  alone  —  even  though  in 
deed,  as  from  not  quite  understanding,  he  had  not 
then  directly  replied;  it  was  the  meaning  of  everything 
else,  down  to  the  conscious  quaintness  of  her  rickety 
"growler"  and  the  conscious  humility  of  her  toneless 
dress.  It  had  helped  him  a  little,  the  question  of  these 
eccentricities,  to  let  her  immediate  appeal  pass  with 
out  an  answer.  He  could  ask  her  instead  what  had 
become  of  her  carriage  and  why  above  all  she  was  n't 
using  it  in  such  weather. 

"It's  just  because  of  the  weather,"  she  explained. 
"  It 's  my  little  idea.  It  makes  me  feel  as  I  used  to  — 
when  I  could  do  as  I  liked." 


THIS  came  out  so  straight  that  he  saw  at  once  how 
much  truth  it  expressed;  yet  it  was  truth  that  still  a 
little  puzzled  him.  "  But  did  you  ever  like  knocking 
about  in  such  discomfort  ? " 

"It  seems  to  me  now  that  I  then  liked  everything. 
It's  the  charm,  at  any  rate,"  she  said  from  her  place 
at  the  fire,  "of  trying  again  the  old  feelings.  They 
come  back  —  they  come  back.  Everything,"  she  went 
on,  "comes  back.  Besides,"  she  wound  up,  "you 
know  for  yourself." 

He  stood  near  her,  his  hands  in  his  pockets ;  but  not 
looking  at  her,  looking  hard  at  the  tea-table.  "Ah  I 
have  n't  your  courage.  Moreover,"  he  laughed,  "it 
seems  to  me  that  so  far  as  that  goes  I  do  live  in  han 
soms.  But  you  must  awfully  want  your  tea,"  he 
quickly  added;  "so  let  me  give  you  a  good  stiff  cup." 

He  busied  himself  with  this  care,  and  she  sat  down, 
on  his  pushing  up  a  low  seat,  where  she  had  been 
standing;  so  that  while  she  talked  he  could  bring  her 
what  she  further  desired.  He  moved  to  and  fro  before 
her,  he  helped  himself;  and  her  visit,  as  the  moments 
passed,  had  more  and  more  the  effect  of  a  signal  com 
munication  that  she  had  come,  all  responsibly  and  de 
liberately,  as  on  the  clear  show  of  the  clock-face  of 
their  situation,  to  make.  The  whole  demonstration, 
none  the  less,  presented  itself  as  taking  place  at  a  very 
high  level  of  debate  —  in  the  cool  upper  air  of  the  finer 

300 


THE  PRINCE 

discrimination,  the  deeper  sincerity,  the  larger  philo 
sophy.  No  matter  what  were  the  facts  invoked  and 
arrayed,  it  was  only  a  question  as  yet  of  their  seeing 
their  way  together:  to  which  indeed  exactly  the  pre 
sent  occasion  appeared  to  have  so  much  to  contribute. 
"It's  not  that  you  haven't  my  courage,"  Charlotte 
said,  "but  that  you  have  n't,  I  rather  think,  my  imag 
ination.  Unless  indeed  it  should  turn  out  after  all," 
she  added,  "that  you  have  n't  even  my  intelligence. 
However,  I  shan't  be  afraid  of  that  till  you  've  given 
me  more  proof."  And  she  made  again,  but  more 
clearly,  her  point  of  a  moment  before.  "You  knew 
besides,  you  knew  to-day  I  'd  come.  And  if  you  knew 
that  you  know  everything."  So  she  pursued,  and  if  he 
did  n't  meanwhile,  if  he  did  n't  even  at  this,  take  her 
up,  it  might  be  that  she  was  so  positively  fitting  him 
again  with  the  fair  face  of  temporising  kindness  that 
he  had  given  her,  to  keep  her  eyes  on,  at  the  other  im 
portant  juncture,  and  the  sense  of  which  she  might 
ever  since  have  been  carrying  about  with  her  like  a 
precious  medal  —  not  exactly  blessed  by  the  Pope  — 
suspended  round  her  neck.  She  had  come  back,  how 
ever  this  might  be,  to  her  immediate  account  of  her 
self,  and  no  mention  of  their  great  previous  passage 
was  to  rise  to  the  lips  of  either.  "Above  all,"  she  said, 
"there  has  been  the  personal  romance  of  it." 

"  Of  tea  with  me  over  the  fire  ?  Ah  so  far  as  that 
goes  I  don't  think  even  my  intelligence  fails  me." 

"Oh  it's  further  than  that  goes;  and  if  I've  had 
a  better  day  than  you  it's  perhaps,  when  I  come  to 
think  of  it,  that  I  am  braver.  You  bore  yourself,  you 
see.  But  I  don't.  I  don't,  I  don't,"  she  repeated. 

301 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"It's  precisely  boring  one's  self  without  relief,"  he 
protested,  "that  takes  courage." 

"  Passive  then  —  not  active.  My  romance  is  that,  if 
you  want  to  know,  I  've  been  all  day  on  the  town. 
Literally  on  the  town  —  is  n't  that  what  they  call  it  ? 
I  know  how  it  feels."  After  which,  as  if  breaking  off, 
"And  you,  have  you  never  been  out?"  she  asked. 

He  still  stood  there  with  his  hands  in  his  pockets. 
"What  should  I  have  gone  out  for?" 

"Oh  what  should  people  in  our  case  do  anything 
for  ?  But  you  're  wonderful,  all  of  you  —  you  know 
how  to  live.  We  're  clumsy  brutes,  we  others,  beside 
you  —  we  must  always  be  '  doing '  something.  How 
ever,"  Charlotte  pursued,  "  if  you  had  gone  out  you 
might  have  missed  the  chance  of  me  —  which  I  'm 
sure,  though  you  won't  confess  it,  was  what  you 
did  n't  want;  and  might  have  missed  above  all  the 
satisfaction  that,  look  blank  about  it  as  you  will,  I  've 
come  to  congratulate  you  on.  That 's  really  what  I  can 
at  last  do.  You  can't  not  know  at  least,  on  such  a  day 
as  this  —  you  can't  not  know,"  she  said,  "where  you 
are."  She  waited  as  for  him  either  to  grant  he  knew 
or  pretend  he  did  n't;  but  he  only  drew  a  long  deep 
breath  which  came  out  like  a  moan  of  impatience.  It 
brushed  aside  the  question  of  where  he  was  or  what  he 
knew;  it  seemed  to  keep  the  ground  clear  for  the  ques 
tion  of  his  visitor  herself,  that  of  Charlotte  Verver 
exactly  as  she  sat  there.  So  for  some  moments,  with 
their  long  look,  they  but  treated  the  matter  in  silence; 
with  the  effect  indeed,  by  the  end  of  the  time,  of  hav 
ing  considerably  brought  it  on.  This  was  sufficiently 
marked  in  what  Charlotte  next  said.  "There  it  all 

302 


THE   PRINCE 

is  —  extraordinary  beyond  words.  It  makes  such  a 
relation  for  us  as,  I  verily  believe,  was  never  before 
in  the  world  thrust  upon  two  well-meaning  creatures. 
Have  n't  we  therefore  to  take  things  as  we  find  them  ? " 
She  put  the  question  still  more  directly  than  that  of  a 
moment  before,  but  to  this  one  as  well  he  returned  no 
immediate  answer.  Noticing  only  that  she  had  fin 
ished  her  tea  he  relieved  her  of  her  cup,  carried  it 
back  to  the  table,  asked  her  what  more  she  would 
have;  and  then,  on  her  "Nothing,  thanks,"  returned 
to  the  fire  and  restored  a  displaced  log  to  position  by  a 
small  but  almost  too  effectual  kick.  She  had  mean 
while  got  up  again,  and  it  was  on  her  feet  that  she 
repeated  the  words  she  had  first  frankly  spoken. 
"What  else  can  we  do,  what  in  all  the  world  else  ?" 

He  took  them  up  however  no  more  than  at  first. 
"Where  then  have  you  been  ? "  he  asked  as  from  mere 
interest  in  her  adventure. 

"Everywhere  I  could  think  of —  except  to  see  peo 
ple.  I  did  n't  want  people  —  I  wanted  too  much  to 
think.  But  I  've  been  back  at  intervals  —  three  times; 
and  then  come  away  again.  My  cabman  must  think 
me  crazy  —  it's  very  amusing;  I  shall  owe  him,  when 
we  come  to  settle,  more  money  than  he  has  ever  seen. 
I've  been,  my  dear,"  she  went  on,  "to  the  British 
Museum  —  which  you  know  I  always  adore.  And 
I  've  been  to  the  National  Gallery  and  to  a  dozen  old 
booksellers',  coming  across  treasures,  and  I  've 
lunched,  on  some  strange  nastiness,  at  a  cookshop  in 
Holborn.  I  wanted  to  go  to  the  Tower,  but  it  was  too 
far  —  my  old  man  urged  that;  and  I'd  have  gone  to 
the  Zoo  if  it  had  n't  been  too  wet  —  which  he  also 

303 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

begged  me  to  observe.  But  you  would  n't  believe  —  I 
did  put  in  Saint  Paul's.  Such  days,"  she  wound  up, 
"  are  expensive ;  for,  besides  the  cab,  I  Ve  bought  quan 
tities  of  books."  She  immediately  passed  at  any  rate 
to  another  point.  "  I  can't  help  wondering  when  you 
must  last  have  laid  eyes  on  them."  And  then  as  it  had 
apparently  for  her  companion  an  effect  of  abruptness : 
"Maggie,  I  mean,  and  the  child.  For  I  suppose  you 
know  he 's  with  her." 

"Oh  yes,  I  know  he's  with  her.  I  saw  them  this 
morning." 

"And  did  they  then  announce  their  programme  ?" 

"She  told  me  she  was  taking  him,  as  usual,  da 
nonno." 

"And  for  the  whole  day?" 

He  hesitated,  but  it  was  as  if  his  attitude  had 
slowly  shifted.  "She  did  n't  say.  And  I  did  n't  ask." 

"Well,"  she  went  on,  "it  can't  have  been  later  than 
half-past  ten  —  I  mean  when  you  saw  them.  They 
had  got  to  Eaton  Square  before  eleven.  You  know  we 
don't  formally  breakfast,  Adam  and  I ;  we  have  tea  in 
our  rooms  —  at  least  I  have;  but  luncheon's  early, 
and  I  saw  my  husband  this  morning  by  twelve ;  he  was 
showing  the  child  a  picture-book.  Maggie  had  been 
there  with  them,  had  left  them  settled  together.  Then 
she  had  gone  out  —  taking  the  carriage  for  something 
he  had  been  intending,  but  that  she  offered  to  do 
instead." 

The  Prince  appeared  to  confess,  at  this,  to  his  in 
terest.  "  Taking,  you  mean,  your  carriage  ? " 

"  I  don't  know  which,  and  it  does  n't  matter.  It 's 
not  a  question,"  she  smiled,  "  of  a  carriage  the  more  or 

304 


THE  PRINCE 

the  less.  It 's  not  a  question  even,  if  you  come  to  that, 
of  a  cab.  It's  so  beautiful,"  she  said,  "that  it's  not  a 
question  of  anything  vulgar  or  horrid."  Which  she 
gave  him  time  to  agree  about;  and  though  he  was 
silent  it  was  rather  remarkably  as  if  he  fell  in.  "I 
went  out  —  I  wanted  to.  I  had  my  idea.  It  seemed 
to  me  important.  It  has  been  —  it  is  important.  I 
know  as  I  have  n't  known  before  the  way  they  feel. 
I  could  n't  in  any  other  way  have  made  so  sure  of 
it." 

"They  feel  a  confidence,"  the  Prince  observed. 

He  had  indeed  said  it  for  her.  "They  feel  a  con 
fidence."  And  she  proceeded  with  lucidity  to  the  fuller 
illustration  of  it;  speaking  again  of  the  three  differ 
ent  moments  that,  in  the  course  of  her  wild  ramble, 
had  witnessed  her  return  —  for  curiosity  and  even 
really  a  little  from  anxiety  —  to  Eaton  Square.  She 
was  possessed  of  a  latch-key  rarely  used  :  it  had  always 
irritated  Adam  —  one  of  the  few  things  that  did  —  to 
find  servants  standing  up  so  inhumanly  straight  when 
they  came  home  in  the  small  hours  after  parties.  "So 
I  had  but  to  slip  in  each  time  with  my  cab  at  the  door 
and  make  out  for  myself,  without  their  knowing  it, 
that  Maggie  was  still  there.  I  came,  I  went  —  with 
out  their  so  much  as  dreaming.  What  do  they  really 
suppose,"  she  asked,  "becomes  of  one?  —  not  so 
much  sentimentally  or  morally,  so  to  call  it,  and  since 
that  does  n't  matter;  but  even  just  physically,  materi 
ally,  as  a  mere  wandering  woman :  as  a  decent  harm 
less  wife,  after  all;  as  the  best  stepmother,  after  all, 
that  really  ever  was;  or  at  the  least  simply  as  a  mai- 
tresse  de  maison  not  quite  without  a  conscience.  They 

305 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

must  even  in  their  odd  way,"  she  declared,  "have  some 
idea." 

"Oh  they've  a  great  deal  of  idea,"  said  the  Prince. 
And  nothing  was  easier  than  to  mention  the  quantity. 
"They  think  so  much  of  us.  They  think  in  particular 
so  much  of  you." 

"Ah  don't  put  it  all  on  'me'!"  she  smiled. 

But  he  was  putting  it  now  where  she  had  admirably 
prepared  the  place.  "It's  a  matter  of  your  known 
character." 

"Ah  thank  you  for  'known'!"  she  still  smiled. 

"It's  a  matter  of  your  wonderful  cleverness  and 
wonderful  charm.  It's  a  matter  of  what  those  things 
have  done  for  you  in  the  world  —  I  mean  in  this  world 
and  this  place.  You  're  a  Personage  for  them  —  and 
Personages  do  go  and  come." 

"Oh  no,  my  dear;  there  you  're  quite  wrong."  And 
she  laughed  now  in  the  happier  light  they  had  diffused. 
"That's  exactly  what  Personages  don't  do:  they  live 
in  state  and  under  constant  consideration;  they 
have  n't  latch-keys,  but  drums  and  trumpets  an 
nounce  them;  and  when  they  go  out  in  'growlers'  it 
makes  a  greater  noise  still.  It's  you,  caro  mio,"  she 
said,  "who,  so  far  as  that  goes,  are  the  Personage." 

"Ah,"  he  in  turn  protested,  "don't  put  it  all  on  me ! 
What,  at  any  rate,  when  you  get  home,"  he  added, 
"shall  you  say  that  you've  been  doing?" 

"I  shall  say,  beautifully,  that  I've  been  here." 

"All  day?" 

"Yes  —  all  day.  Keeping  you  company  in  your 
solitude.  How  can  we  understand  anything,"  she 
went  on,  "without  really  seeing  that  this  is  what  they 

306 


THE  PRINCE 

must  like  to  think  I  do  for  you  ?  —  just  as,  quite  as 
comfortably,  you  do  it  for  me.  The  thing  is  for  us  to 
learn  to  take  them  as  they  are." 

He  considered  this  a  while,  in  his  restless  way,  but 
with  his  eyes  not  turning  from  her;  after  which,  rather 
disconnectedly,  though  very  vehemently,  he  brought 
out :  "  How  can  I  not  feel  more  than  anything  else  how 
they  adore  together  my  boy  ? "  And  then,  further,  as 
if,  slightly  disconcerted,  she  had  nothing  to  meet  this 
and  he  quickly  perceived  the  effect:  "They'd  have 
done  the  same  for  one  of  yours." 

"Ah  if  I  could  have  had  one — !  I  hoped  and  I 
believed,"  said  Charlotte,  "that  that  would  happen. 
It  would  have  been  better.  It  would  have  made  per 
haps  some  difference.  He  thought  so  too,  poor  duck 
—  that  it  might  have  been.  I  'm  sure  he  hoped  and 
intended  so.  It's  not,  at  any  rate,"  she  went  on,  "my 
fault.  There  it  is."  She  had  uttered  these  statements, 
one  by  one,  gravely,  sadly  and  responsibly,  owing  it  to 
her  friend  to  be  clear.  She  paused  briefly,  but,  as  if 
once  for  all,  she  made  her  clearness  complete.  "And 
now  I  'm  too  sure.  It  will  never  be." 
He  waited  for  a  moment.  "  Never  ? " 
"Never."  They  treated  the  matter  not  exactly  with 
solemnity,  but  with  a  certain  decency,  even  perhaps 
urgency,  of  distinctness.  "It  would  probably  have 
been  better,"  Charlotte  added.  "But  things  turn 
out  — !  And  it  leaves  us  "  —  she  made  the  point  — 
"more  alone." 

He  seemed  to  wonder.   "  It  leaves  you  more  alone." 

"Oh,"  she  again  returned,  "don't  put  it  all  on  me! 

Maggie  would  have  given  herself  to  his  child,  I  'm 

307 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

sure,  scarcely  less  than  he  gives  himself  to  yours.  It 
would  have  taken  more  than  any  child  of  mine,"  she 
explained  —  "it  would  have  taken  more  than  ten  child 
ren  of  mine,  could  I  have  had  them  —  to  keep  our 
sposi  apart."  She  smiled  as  for  the  breadth  of  the 
image,  but  as  he  seemed  to  take  it  in  spite  of  this  for 
important  she  then  spoke  gravely  enough.  "It's  as 
strange  as  you  like,  but  we  're  immensely  alone."  He 
kept  vaguely  moving,  but  there  were  moments  when 
again,  with  an  awkward  ease  and  his  hands  in  his 
pockets,  he  was  more  directly  before  her.  He  stood 
there  at  these  last  words,  which  had  the  effect  of  mak 
ing  him  for  a  little  throw  back  his  head  and,  as  think 
ing  something  out,  stare  up  at  the  ceiling.  "What 
will  you  say," she  meanwhile  asked,  "that  you  've  been 
doing?"  This  brought  his  consciousness  and  his  eyes 
back  to  her,  and  she  pointed  her  question.  "I  mean 
when  she  comes  in  —  for  I  suppose  she  will)  some 
time,  come  in.  It  seems  to  me  we  must  say  the  same 
thing." 

Well,  he  thought  again.  "Yet  I  can  scarce  pretend 
to  have  had  what  I  have  n't." 

"Ah  what  haven't  you  had?  —  what  aren't  you 
having  ? " 

Her  question  rang  out  as  they  lingered  face  to  face, 
and  he  still  took  it,  before  he  answered,  from  her  eyes. 
"We  must  at  least  then,  not  to  be  absurd  together,  do 
the  same  thing.  We  must  act,  it  would  really  seem, 
in  concert." 

"It  would  really  seem ! "  Her  eyebrows,  her  shoul 
ders  went  up,  quite  in  gaiety,  as  for  the  relief  this 
brought  her.  "It's  all  in  the  world  I  pretend.  We 

308 


THE   PRINCE 

must  act  in  concert.   Heaven  knows,"  she  said,  "they 
do!" 

So  it  was  that  he  evidently  saw  and  that,  by  his 
admission,  the  case  could  fairly  be  put.  But  what  he 
evidently  saw  appeared  to  come  over  him,  at  the  same 
time,  as  too  much  for  him,  so  that  he  fell  back  sud 
denly  to  ground  where  she  was  n't  awaiting  him. 
"The  difficulty  is,  and  will  always  be,  that  I  don't 
understand  them.  I  did  n't  at  first,  but  I  thought  I 
should  learn  to.  That  was  what  I  hoped,  and  it  ap 
peared  then  that  Fanny  Assingham  might  help  me." 

"Oh  Fanny  Assingham!"  said  Charlotte  Verver. 

He  stared  a  moment  at  her  tone.  "She  would  do 
anything  for  us." 

To  which  Charlotte  at  first  said  nothing  —  as  if 
from  the  sense  of  too  much.  Then,  indulgently 
enough,  she  shook  her  head.  "We're  beyond  her." 

He  thought  a  moment  —  as  of  where  this  placed 
them.  "She'd  do  anything  then  for  them." 

"Well,  so  would  we  —  so  that  doesn't  help  us. 
She  has  broken  down.  She  does  n't  understand  us. 
And  really,  my  dear,"  Charlotte  added,  "Fanny 
Assingham  does  n't  matter." 

He  wondered  again.  "Unless  as  taking  care  of 
them." 

"Ah,"  Charlotte  instantly  said,  "isn't  it  for  us, 
only,  to  do  that  ? "  She  spoke  as  with  a  flare  of  pride 
for  their  privilege  and  their  duty.  "  I  think  we  want  no 
one's  aid." 

She  spoke  indeed  with  a  nobleness  not  the  less  effect 
ive  for  coming  in  so  oddly;  with  a  sincerity  visible 
even  through  the  complicated  twist  by  which  any 

309 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

effort  to  protect  the  father  and  the  daughter  seemed 
necessarily  conditioned  for  them.  It  moved  him,  in 
any  case,  as  if  some  spring  of  his  own,  a  weaker  one, 
had  suddenly  been  broken  by  it.  These  things,  all  the 
while,  the  privilege,  the  duty,  the  opportunity,  had 
been  the  substance  of  his  own  vision ;  they  formed  the 
note  he  had  been  keeping  back  to  show  her  that  he 
was  n't,  in  their  so  special  situation,  without  a  respons 
ible  view.  A  conception  he  could  name  and  could  act 
on  was  something  that  now  at  last,  not  to  be  too  em 
inent  a  fool,  he  was  required  by  all  the  graces  to  pro 
duce,  and  the  luminous  idea  she  had  herself  uttered 
would  have  been  his  expression  of  it.  She  had  anti 
cipated  him,  but  since  her  expression  left,  for  positive 
beauty,  nothing  to  be  desired,  he  felt  rather  righted 
than  wronged.  A  large  response,  as  he  looked  at  her, 
came  into  his  face,  a  light  of  excited  perception,  all  his 
own,  in  the  glory  of  which  —  as  it  almost  might  be 
called  —  what  he  gave  her  back  had  the  value  of  what 
she  had  given  him.  "They  're  extraordinarily  happy." 

Oh  Charlotte's  measure  of  it  was  only  too  full. 
"Beatifically." 

"That's  the  great  thing,"  he  went  on;  "so  that  it 
does  n't  matter,  really,  that  one  does  n't  understand. 
Besides,  you  do  —  enough." 

"I  understand  my  husband  perhaps,"  she  after  an 
instant  conceded.  "  I  don't  understand  your  wife." 

"You're  of  the  same  race,  at  any  rate — more  or 
less;  of  the  same  general  tradition  and  education,  of 
the  same  moral  paste.  There  are  things  you  have  in 
common  with  them.  But  I,  on  my  side,  as  I  Ve  gone 
on  trying  to  see  if  I  have  n't  some  of  these  things  too  — 


THE  PRINCE 

I,  on  my  side,  have  more  and  more  failed.  There  seem 
at  last  to  be  none  worth  mentioning.  I  can't  help 
seeing  it  —  I  'm  decidedly  too  different." 

"  Yet  you  're  not "  —  Charlotte  made  the  important 
point  —  "too  different  from  me" 

"I  don't  know  —  as  we're  not  married.  That 
brings  things  out.  Perhaps  if  we  were,"  he  said,  "you 
would  find  some  abyss  of  divergence." 

"Since  it  depends  on  that  then,"  she  smiled,  "I'm 
safe  —  as  you  are  anyhow.  Moreover,  as  one  has  so 
often  had  occasion  to  feel,  and  even  to  remark,  they're 
very,  very  simple.  That  makes,"  she  added,  "a  dif 
ficulty  for  belief;  but  when  once  one  has  taken  it  in 
it  makes  less  difficulty  for  action.  I  have  at  last,  for 
myself,  I  think,  taken  it  in.  I  'm  not  afraid." 

He  wondered  a  moment.   "Not  afraid  of  what?" 

"Well,  generally,  of  some  beastly  mistake.  Espe 
cially  of  any  mistake  founded  on  one's  idea  of  their 
difference.  For  that  idea,"  Charlotte  developed,  "  pos 
itively  makes  one  so  tender." 

"Ah  but  rather!" 

"Well  then  there  it  is.  I  can't  put  myself  into 
Maggie's  skin  —  I  can't,  as  I  say.  It's  not  my  fit  —  I 
should  n't  be  able,  as  I  see  it,  to  breathe  in  it.  But  I 
can  feel  that  I  'd  do  anything  to  shield  it  from  a  bruise. 
Tender  as  I  am  for  her  too,"  she  went  on,  "I  think 
I  'm  still  more  so  for  my  husband.  He's  in  truth  of  a 
sweet  simplicity — !" 

The  Prince  turned  over  a  while  the  sweet  simplicity 
of  Mr.  Verver.  "Well,  I  don't  know  that  I  can  choose. 
At  night  all  cats  are  grey.  I  only  see  how,  for  so  many 
reasons,  we  ought  to  stand  toward  them  —  and  how, 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

to  do  ourselves  justice,  we  do.  It  represents  for  us  a 
conscious  care  —  " 

"Of  every  hour,  literally,"  said  Charlotte.  She 
could  rise  to  the  highest  measure  of  the  facts.  "And 
for  which  we  must  trust  each  other  — ! " 

"Oh  as  we  trust  the  saints  in  glory.  Fortunately," 
the  Prince  hastened  to  add,  "we  can."  With  which, 
as  for  the  full  assurance  and  the  pledge  it  involved, 
each  hand  instinctively  found  the  other.  "  It 's  all  too 
wonderful." 

Firmly  and  gravely  she  kept  his  hand.  "It's  too 
beautiful." 

And  so  for  a  minute  they  stood  together  as  strongly 
held  and  as  closely  confronted  as  any  hour  of  their 
easier  past  even  had  seen  them.  They  were  silent  at 
first,  only  facing  and  faced,  only  grasping  and  grasped, 
only  meeting  and  met.  "  It 's  sacred,"  he  said  at  last. 

"It's  sacred,"  she  breathed  back  to  him.  They 
vowed  it,  gave  it  out  and  took  it  in,  drawn,  by  their 
intensity,  more  closely  together.  Then  of  a  sudden, 
through  this  tightened  circle,  as  at  the  issue  of  a  nar 
row  strait  into  the  sea  beyond,  everything  broke  up, 
broke  down,  gave  way,  melted  and  mingled.  Their 
lips  sought  their  lips,  their  pressure  their  response  and 
their  response  their  pressure;  with  a  violence  that  had 
sighed  itself  the  next  moment  to  the  longest  and  deep 
est  of  stillnesses  they  passionately  sealed  their  pledge. 


VI 


HE  had  taken  it  from  her,  as  we  have  seen  moreover, 
that  Fanny  Assingham  did  n't  now  matter  —  the 
"now"  he  had  even  himself  supplied,  as  no  more  than 
fair  to  his  sense  of  various  earlier  stages;  and,  though 
his  assent  remained  scarce  more  than  tacit,  his  be 
haviour,  for  the  hour,  so  fell  into  line  that  for  many 
days  he  kept  postponing  the  visit  he  had  promised  his 
old  friend  on  the  occasion  of  their  talk  at  the  Foreign 
Office.  With  regret,  none  the  less,  would  he  have  seen 
it  quite  extinguished,  that  theory  of  their  relation  as 
attached  pupil  and  kind  instructress  in  which  they 
had  from  the  first  almost  equally  found  a  convenience. 
It  had  been  he,  no  doubt,  who  had  most  put  it  for 
ward,  since  his  need  of  knowledge  fairly  exceeded  her 
mild  pretension;  but  he  had  again  and  again  repeated 
to  her  that  he  should  never,  without  her,  have  been 
where  he  was,  and  she  had  n't  successfully  concealed 
the  pleasure  it  might  give  her  to  believe  it,  even  after 
the  question  of  where  he  was  had  begun  to  show  itself 
as  rather  more  closed  than  open  to  interpretation.  It 
had  never  indeed,  before  that  evening,  come  up  as 
during  the  passage  at  the  official  party,  and  he  had  for 
the  first  time  at  those  moments,  a  little  disappointedly, 
got  the  impression  of  a  certain  failure,  on  the  dear 
woman's  part,  of  something  he  was  aware  of  having 
always  rather  freely  taken  for  granted  in  her.  Of  what 
exactly  the  failure  consisted  he  would  still  perhaps 

313 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

have  felt  it  a  little  harsh  to  try  to  say;  and  if  she  had  in 
fact,  as  by  Charlotte's  observation,  "broken  down," 
the  details  of  the  collapse  would  be  comparatively 
unimportant.   They  came  to  the  same  thing,  all  such 
collapses  —  the    failure    of   courage,    the    failure    of 
friendship,   or  the   failure  just  simply  of  tact;   for 
did  n't  any  one  of  them  by  itself  amount  really  to  the 
failure  of  wit  ?  —  which  was  the  last  thing  he  had 
expected  of  her  and  which  would   be   but  another 
name  for  the  triumph  of  stupidity.   It  had  been  Char 
lotte's  remark  that  they  were  at  last  "beyond"  her; 
whereas  he  had  ever  enjoyed  believing  that  a  certain 
easy  imagination  in  her  would  keep  up  with  him  to 
the  end.    He  shrank  from  affixing  a  label  to  Mrs. 
Assingham's  want  of  faith;  but  when  he  thought  at 
his  ease  of  the  way  persons  who  were  capable  really 
entertained  —  or  at  least  with  any  refinement  —  the 
passion  of  personal  loyalty,  he  figured  for  them  a  play 
of  fancy  neither  timorous  nor  scrupulous.    So  would 
his  personal  loyalty,  if  need  be,  have  accepted  the  ad 
venture  for  the  good  creature  herself;  to  that  definite 
degree  that  he  had  positively  almost  missed  the  luxury 
of  some  such  call  from  her.  That  was  what  it  all  came 
back  to  again  with  these  people  among  whom  he  had 
married  —  that  one  found  one  used  one's  imagination 
mainly  for  wondering  how  they  contrived  so  little  to 
appeal  to  it.  He  felt  at  moments  as  if  there  were  never 
anything  to  do  for  them  that  was  worthy  —  to  call 
worthy  —  of  the  personal  relation ;  never  any  charm 
ing  charge  to  take  of  any  confidence  deeply  reposed. 
He  might  vulgarly  have  put  it  that  one  had  never  to 
plot  or  to  lie  for  them;  he  might  humorously  have 

3H 


THE   PRINCE 

put  it  that  one  had  never,  as  by  the  higher  conformity, 
to  lie  in  wait  with  the  dagger  or  to  prepare  insidiously 
the  cup.  These  were  the  services  that  by  all  romantic 
tradition  were  consecrated  to  affection  quite  as  much 
as  to  hate.  But  he  could  amuse  himself  with  saying  — 
so  far  as  the  amusement  went  —  that  they  were  what 
he  had  once  for  all  turned  his  back  on. 

Fanny  was  meanwhile  frequent,  it  appeared,  in 
Eaton  Square;  so  much  he  gathered  from  the  visitor 
who  was  not  infrequent,  least  of  all  at  tea-time,  during 
the  same  period,  in  Portland  Place;  though  they  had 
little  need  to  talk  of  her  after  practically  agreeing  that 
they  had  outlived  her.  To  the  scene  of  these  conversa 
tions  and  suppressions  Mrs.  Assingham  herself  made, 
actually,  no  approach ;  her  latest  view  of  her  utility 
seeming  to  be  that  it  had  found  in  Eaton  Square  its 
most  urgent  field.  It  was  finding  there  in  fact  every 
thing  and  every  one  but  the  Prince,  who  mostly,  just 
now,  kept  away,  or  who  at  all  events,  on  the  inter 
spaced  occasions  of  his  calling,  happened  not  to  en 
counter  the  only  person  from  whom  he  was  a  little 
estranged.  It  would  have  been  all  prodigious  if  he 
had  n't  already,  with  Charlotte's  aid,  so  very  consider 
ably  lived  into  it  —  it  would  have  been  all  inde 
scribably  remarkable,  this  fact  that,  with  wonderful 
causes  for  it  so  operating  on  the  surface,  nobody  else, 
as  yet,  in  the  combination,  seemed  estranged  from 
anybody.  If  Mrs.  Assingham  delighted  in  Maggie  she 
knew  by  this  time  how  most  easily  to  reach  her,  and 
if  she  was  unhappy  about  Charlotte  she  knew  by  the 
same  reasoning  how  most  probably  to  miss  that  vision 
of  her  on  which  affliction  would  feed.  It  might  feed  of 

315 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

course  on  finding  her  so  absent  from  her  home  — 
just  as  this  particular  phenomenon  of  her  domestic 
detachment  could  be,  by  the  anxious  mind,  best 
studied  there.  Fanny  was,  however,  for  her  reasons, 
"  shy  "  of  Portland  Place  itself — this  was  appreci 
able;  so  that  she  might  well,  after  all,  have  no  great 
light  on  the  question  of  whether  Charlotte's  appear 
ances  there  were  frequent  or  not,  any  more  than  on 
that  of  the  account  they  might  be  keeping  of  the  usual 
solitude  (since  it  came  to  this)  of  the  head  of  that 
house.  There  was  always,  to  cover  all  ambiguities, 
to  constitute  a  fund  of  explanation  for  the  divisions  of 
Mrs.  Verver's  day,  the  circumstance  that,  at  the  point 
they  had  all  reached  together,  Mrs.  Verver  was 
definitely  and  by  general  acclamation  in  charge  of  the 
"  social  relations  "  of  the  family,  literally  of  those  of 
the  two  households;  as  to  her  genius  for  representing 
which  in  the  great  world  and  in  the  grand  style  vivid 
evidence  had  more  and  more  accumulated.  It  had 
been  established  in  the  two  households  at  an  early 
stage  and  with  the  highest  good  humour  that  Char 
lotte  was  a,  was  the,  "social  success,"  whereas  the 
Princess,  though  kind,  though  punctilious,  though 
charming,  though  in  fact  the  dearest  little  creature  in 
the  world  and  the  Princess  into  the  bargain,  was  dis 
tinctly  not,  would  distinctly  never  be,  and  might  as 
well  give  it  up  altogether;  whether  through  being  above 
it  or  below  it,  too  much  outside  of  it  or  too  much  lost 
in  it,  too  unequipped  or  too  indisposed,  did  n't  espe 
cially  matter.  What  sufficed  was  that  the  whole  thing, 
call  it  appetite  or  call  it  patience,  the  act  of  representa 
tion  at  large  and  the  daily  business  of  intercourse,  fell 

316 


THE   PRINCE 

in  with  Charlotte's  tested  facility  and,  not  much  less 
visibly,  with  her  accommodating,  her  generous  view 
of  her  domestic  use.  She  had  come,  frankly,  into  the 
connexion,  to  do  and  to  be  what  she  could,  "no  ques 
tions  asked,"  and  she  had  taken  over  accordingly  as 
it  stood,  and  in  the  finest  practical  spirit,  the  burden 
of  a  visiting-list  that  Maggie,  originally,  left  to  her 
self,  and  left  even  more  to  the  Principino,  had  suffered 
to  get  inordinately  out  of  hand. 

She  had  in  a  word  not  only  mounted  cheerfully  the 
London  treadmill  —  she  had  handsomely  professed 
herself,  for  the  further  comfort  of  the  three  others,  sus 
tained  in  the  effort  by  a  "frivolous  side,"  if  that  were 
not  too  harsh  a  name  for  a  pleasant  constitutional 
curiosity.  There  were  possibilities  of  dulness,  ponder 
osities  of  practice,  arid  social  sands,  the  bad  quar 
ters  of  an  hour  that  turned  up  like  false  pieces  in  a 
debased  currency,  of  which  she  made,  on  principle, 
very  nearly  as  light  as  if  she  had  n't  been  clever 
enough  to  distinguish.  The  Prince  had,  on  this  score, 
paid  her  his  compliment  soon  after  her  return  from 
her  wedding-tour  in  America,  where,  by  all  accounts, 
she  had  wondrously  borne  the  brunt;  facing  brightly, 
at  her  husband's  side,  everything  that  came  up  —  and 
what  had  come,  often,  was  beyond  words :  just  as,  pre 
cisely,  with  her  own  interest  only  at  stake,  she  had 
thrown  up  the  game  during  the  visit  paid  before  her 
marriage.  The  discussion  of  the  American  world,  the 
comparison  of  notes,  impressions  and  adventures,  had 
been  all  at  hand,  as  a  ground  of  meeting  for  Mrs. 
Verver  and  her  husband's  son-in-law,  from  the  hour 
of  the  reunion  of  the  two  couples.  Thus  it  had  been  in 

317 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

short  that  Charlotte  could,  for  her  friend's  apprecia 
tion,  so  promptly  make  her  point;  even  using  expres 
sions  from  which  he  let  her  see,  at  the  hour,  that  he 
drew  amusement  of  his  own.  "What  could  be  more 
simple  than  one's  going  through  with  everything,"  she 
had  asked,  "when  it's  so  plain  a  part  of  one's  con 
tract  ?  I  've  got  so  much,  by  my  marriage  "  —  for  she 
had  never  for  a  moment  concealed  from  him  how 
"much"  she  had  felt  it  and  was  finding  it  —  "that  I 
should  deserve  no  charity  if  I  stinted  my  return.  Not 
to  do  that,  to  give  back  on  the  contrary  all  one  can, 
are  just  one's  decency  and  one's  honour  and  one's  vir 
tue.  These  things,  henceforth,  if  you  're  interested  to 
know,  are  my  rule  of  life,  the  absolute  little  gods  of 
my  worship,  the  holy  images  set  up  on  the  wall.  Oh 
yes,  since  I'm  not  a  brute,"  she  had  wound  up,  "you 
shall  see  me  as  I  am!"  Which  was  therefore  as  he 
had  seen  her — dealing  always,  from  month  to  month, 
from  day  to  day  and  from  one  occasion  to  the  other, 
with  the  duties  of  a  remunerated  office.  Her  perfect, 
her  brilliant  efficiency  had  doubtless  all  the  while  con 
tributed  immensely  to  the  pleasant  ease  in  which  her 
husband  and  her  husband's  daughter  were  lapped.  It 
had  in  fact  probably  done  something  more  than  this  — 
it  had  given  them  a  finer  and  sweeter  view  of  the  pos 
sible  scope  of  that  ease.  They  had  brought  her  in  — 
on  the  crudest  expression  of  it  —  to  do  the  "worldly  " 
for  them,  and  she  had  done  it  with  such  genius  that 
they  had  themselves  in  consequence  renounced  it  even 
more  than  they  had  originally  intended.  In  propor 
tion  as  she  did  it  moreover  was  she  to  be  relieved  of 
other  and  humbler  doings;  which  minor  matters, 

318 


THE   PRINCE 

by  the  properest  logic,  devolved  therefore  upon 
Maggie,  in  whose  chords  and  whose  province  they 
more  naturally  lay.  Not  less  naturally,  by  the  same 
token,  they  included  the  repair,  at  the  hands  of  the 
latter  young  woman,  of  every  stitch  conceivably 
dropped  by  Charlotte  in  Eaton  Square.  This  was 
homely  work,  but  that  was  just  what  made  it  Maggie's. 
Bearing  in  mind  dear  Amerigo,  who  was  so  much  of 
her  own  great  mundane  feather,  and  whom  the 
homeliness  in  question  did  n't,  no  doubt,  quite  equal 
ly  provide  for  —  that  would  be,  to  balance,  just  in  a 
manner  Charlotte's  very  most  charming  function, 
from  the  moment  Charlotte  could  be  got  adequately 
to  recognise  it. 

Well,  that  Charlotte  might  be  appraised  as  at  last 
not  ineffectually  recognising  it  was  a  reflexion  that, 
during  the  days  with  which  we  are  actually  engaged, 
completed  in  the  Prince's  breast  these  others,  these 
images  and  ruminations  of  his  leisure,  these  gropings 
and  fittings  of  his  conscience  and  his  experience,  that 
we  have  attempted  to  set  in  order  there.  They  bore 
him  company,  not  insufficiently  —  considering  in 
especial  his  fuller  resources  in  that  line  —  while  he 
worked  out  to  the  last  lucidity  the  principle  on  which 
he  forbore  either  to  follow  up  Fanny  in  Cadogan 
Place  or  to  perpetrate  the  error  of  too  marked  an 
assiduity  in  Eaton  Square.  This  error  would  be  his 
not  availing  himself  to  the  utmost  of  the  convenience 
of  any  artless  theory  of  his  constitution,  or  of  Char 
lotte's,  that  might  prevail  there.  That  artless  theories 
could  and  did  prevail  was  a  fact  he  had  ended  by 
accepting,  under  copious  evidence,  as  definite  and 

319 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

ultimate;  and  it  consorted  with  common  prudence, 
with  the  simplest  economy  of  life,  not  to  be  wasteful 
of  any  odd  gleaning.  To  haunt  Eaton  Square  in  fine 
would  be  to  show  that  he  had  n't,  like  his  brilliant 
associate,  a  sufficiency  of  work  in  the  world.  It  was 
just  his  having  that  sufficiency,  it  was  just  their  having 
it  together,  that,  so  strangely  and  so  blessedly,  made, 
as  they  put  it  to  each  other,  everything  possible. 
What  further  propped  up  the  case  moreover  was  that 
the  "world,"  by  still  another  beautiful  perversity  of 
their  chance,  included  Portland  Place  without  includ 
ing  to  anything  like  the  same  extent  Eaton  Square. 
The  latter  residence,  at  the  same  time,  it  must 
promptly  be  added,  did  on  occasion  wake  up  to  op 
portunity  and,  as  giving  itself  a  frolic  shake,  send 
out  a  score  of  invitations — one  of  which  fitful  flights, 
precisely,  had,  before  Easter,  the  effect  of  disturbing 
a  little  our  young  man's  measure  of  his  margin. 
Maggie,  with  a  proper  spirit,  held  that  her  father 
ought  from  time  to  time  to  give  a  really  considered 
dinner,  and  Mr.  Verver,  who  had  as  little  idea  as 
ever  of  not  meeting  expectation,  was  of  the  harmoni 
ous  opinion  that  his  wife  ought.  Charlotte's  own 
judgement  was  always  that  they  were  ideally  free  — 
the  proof  of  which  would  always  be,  she  maintained, 
that  everyone  they  feared  they  might  most  have  alien 
ated  by  neglect  would  arrive,  wreathed  in  smiles,  on 
the  merest  hint  of  a  belated  signal.  Wreathed  in 
smiles,  all  round,  truly  enough,  these  apologetic  ban 
quets  struck  Amerigo  as  being;  they  were  frankly 
touching  occasions  to  him,  marked,  in  the  great 
London  bousculade,  with  a  small  still  grace  of  their 

320 


THE   PRINCE 

own,  an  investing  amenity  and  humanity.  Everybody 
came,  everybody  rushed ;  but  all  succumbed  to  the  soft 
influence,  and  the  brutality  of  mere  multitude,  of  curi 
osity  without  tenderness,  was  put  off,  at  the  foot  of 
the  fine  staircase,  with  the  overcoats  and  shawls.  The 
entertainment  offered  a  few  evenings  before  Easter, 
and  at  which  Maggie  and  he  were  inevitably  present 
as  guests,  was  a  discharge  of  obligations  not  insistently 
incurred,  and  had  thus  possibly  all  the  more  the  note 
of  this  almost  Arcadian  optimism :  a  large  bright 
dull  murmurous  mild-eyed  middle-aged  dinner,  in 
volving  for  the  most  part  very  bland,  though  very 
exalted,  immensely  announceable  and  hierarchically 
placeable  couples,  and  followed,  without  the  op 
pression  of  a  later  contingent,  by  a  brief  instrumental 
concert,  over  the  preparation  of  which,  the  Prince 
knew,  Maggie's  anxiety  had  conferred  with  Char 
lotte's  ingenuity  and  both  had  supremely  revelled,  as 
it  were,  in  Mr.  Verver's  solvency. 

The  Assinghams  were  there,  by  prescription, 
though  quite  at  the  foot  of  the  social  ladder ;  and  with 
the  Colonel's  wife,  in  spite  of  her  humility  of  position, 
the  Prince  was  more  inwardly  occupied  than  with  any 
other  person  except  Charlotte.  He  was  occupied  with 
Charlotte  because  in  the  first  place  she  looked  so  in 
ordinately  handsome  and  held  so  high,  where  so  much 
else  was  mature  and  sedate,  the  torch  of  responsive 
youth  and  the  standard  of  passive  grace;  and  because 
of  the  fact  that,  in  the  second,  the  occasion,  so  far 
as  it  referred  itself  with  any  confidence  of  emphasis 
to  a  hostess,  seemed  to  refer  itself  preferentially,  well- 
meaningly  and  perversely,  to  Maggie.  It  was  n't  in- 

321 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

distinguishable  to  him,  when  once  they  were  all  sta 
tioned,  that  his  wife  too  had  in  perfection  her  own 
little  character;  but  he  wondered  how  it  managed  so 
visibly  to  simplify  itself —  and  this,  he  knew,  in  spite 
of  any  desire  she  entertained  —  to  the  essential  air  of 
having  overmuch  on  her  mind  the  felicity,  and  indeed 
the  very  conduct  and  credit,  of  the  feast.  He  knew 
as  well  the  other  things  of  which  her  appearance  was 
at  any  time  —  and  in  Eaton  Square  especially  — 
made  up:  her  resemblance  to  her  father,  at  times  so 
vivid  and  coming  out,  in  the  delicate  warmth  of  occa 
sions,  like  the  quickened  fragrance  of  a  flower;  her 
resemblance,  as  he  had  hit  it  oif  for  her  once  in  Rome, 
during  the  first  flushed  days  after  their  engagement, 
to  a  little  dancing-girl  at  rest,  ever  so  light  of  move 
ment  but  most  often  panting  gently,  even  a  shade  com- 
punctiously,  on  a  bench;  her  approximation,  finally 
—  for  it  was  analogy  somehow  more  than  identity — to 
the  transmitted  images  of  rather  neutral  and  nega 
tive  propriety  that  made  up,  in  his  long  line,  the  aver 
age  of  wifehood  and  motherhood.  If  the  Roman 
matron  had  been,  in  sufficiency,  first  and  last,  the 
honour  of  that  line,  Maggie  would  no  doubt,  at  fifty, 
have  expanded,  have  solidified  to  some  such  dignity, 
even  should  she  suggest  a  little  but  a  Cornelia  in  min 
iature.  A  light  however  broke  for  him  in  season,  and 
when  once  it  had  done  so  it  made  him  more  than  ever 
aware  of  Mrs.  Verver's  vaguely  yet  quite  exquisitely 
contingent  participation  —  a  mere  hinted  or  tendered 
discretion;  in  short  of  Mrs.  Verver's  indescribable 
unfathomable  relation  to  the  scene.  Her  placed  condi 
tion,  her  natural  seat  and  neighbourhood,  her  intenser 

322 


THE   PRINCE 

presence,  her  quieter  smile,  her  fewer  jewels,  were  in 
evitably  all  as  nothing  compared  with  the  preoccupa 
tion  that  burned  in  Maggie  like  a  small  flame  and  that 
had  in  fact  kindled  in  each  of  her  cheeks  a  little  attest 
ing,  but  fortunately  by  no  means  unbecoming,  spot. 
The  party  was  her  father's  party  and  its  greater  or 
smaller  success  was  a  question  having  for  her  all  the 
importance  of  bis  importance;  so  that  sympathy 
created  for  her  a  visible  suspense,  under  pressure  of 
which  she  bristled  with  filial  reference,  with  little 
filial  recalls  of  expression,  movement,  tone.  It  was 
all  unmistakeable,  and  as  pretty  as  possible,  if  one 
would,  and  even  as  funny;  but  it  put  the  pair  so  to 
gether  as  undivided  by  the  marriage  of  each  that  the 
Princess  —  il  ny  avait  pas  a  dire  —  might  sit  where 
she  liked :  she  would  still  always  in  that  house  be 
irremediably  Maggie  Verver.  The  Prince  found  him 
self  at  this  hour  so  beset  with  the  perception  we  speak 
of  that  its  natural  complement  for  him  would  really 
have  been  to  wonder  if  Mr.  Verver  had  produced  on 
people  something  of  the  same  impression  in  the  re 
corded  cases  of  his  having  dined  with  his  daughter. 
This  backward  speculation,  had  it  begun  to  play, 
however,  would  have  been  easily  arrested ;  for  it  was 
at  present  to  come  over  Amerigo  as  never  before  that 
his  remarkable  father-in-law  was  the  man  in  the  world 
least  equipped  with  different  appearances  for  different 
times.  He  was  simple,  he  was  a  revelation  of  sim 
plicity,  and  that  was  the  end  of  him  so  far  as  he 
consisted  of  an  appearance  at  all  —  a  question  that 
might  verily,  for  a  weakness  in  it,  have  been  argued. 
It  amused  our  young  man,  who  was  taking  his  pleas- 

323 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

ure  to-night,  it  will  be  seen,  in  sundry  occult  ways, 
it  amused  him  to  feel  how  everything  else  the  master 
of  the  house  consisted  of — resources,  possessions,  facil 
ities  and  amiabilities  amplified  by  the  social  legend  — 
depended,  for  conveying  the  effect  of  quantity,  on  no 
personal  "equation,"  no  mere  measurable  medium. 
Quantity  was  in  the  air  for  these  good  people,  and 
Mr.  Verver's  estimable  quality  was  almost  wholly  in 
that  pervasion.  He  was  meagre  and  modest  and  clear- 
browed,  and  his  eyes,  if  they  wandered  without  fear, 
yet  stayed  without  defiance;  his  shoulders  were  not 
broad,  his  chest  was  not  high,  his  complexion  was 
not  fresh  and  the  crown  of  his  head  was  not  cov 
ered;  in  spite  of  all  of  which  he  looked,  at  the  top 
of  his  table,  so  nearly  like  a  little  boy  shyly  entertain 
ing  in  virtue  of  some  imposed  rank,  that  he  could 
only  be  one  of  the  powers,  the  representative  of  a 
force  —  quite  as  an  infant  king  is  the  representative 
of  a  dynasty.  In  this  generalised  view  of  his  father-in- 
law,  intensified  to-night  but  always  operative,  Amer 
igo  had  now  for  some  time  taken  refuge.  The  refuge, 
after  the  reunion  of  the  two  households  in  England, 
had  more  and  more  offered  itself  as  the  substitute  for 
communities,  from  man  to  man,  that,  by  his  original 
calculation,  might  have  become  possible,  but  that  had 
not  really  ripened  and  flowered.  He  met  the  decent 
family  eyes  across  the  table,  met  them  afterwards  in 
the  music-room,  but  only  to  read  in  them  still  what 
he  had  learned  to  read  during  his  first  months,  the 
time  of  over-anxious  initiation,  a  kind  of  apprehen 
sion  in  wrhich  the  terms  and  conditions  were  finally 
fixed  and  absolute.  This  directed  regard  rested  at  its 

324 


THE   PRINCE 

ease,  but  it  neither  lingered  nor  penetrated,  and  was, 
to  the  Prince's  fancy,  much  of  the  same  order  as  any 
glance  directed,  for  due  attention,  from  the  same  quar 
ter,  to  the  figure  of  a  cheque  received  in  the  course  of 
business  and  about  to  be  enclosed  to  a  banker.  It 
made  sure  of  the  amount  —  and  just  so,  from  time  to 
time,  the  amount  of  the  Prince  was  certified.  He 
was  being  thus,  in  renewed  instalments,  perpetually 
paid  in ;  he  already  reposed  in  the  bank  as  a  value,  but 
subject,  in  this  comfortable  way,  to  repeated,  to  infin 
ite  endorsement.  The  net  result  of  all  of  which  more 
over  was  that  the  young  man  had  no  wish  to  see  his 
value  diminish.  He  himself  decidedly  had  n't  fixed 
it  —  the  "  figure  "  was  a  conception  all  of  Mr.  Verver's 
own.  Certainly  however  everything  must  be  kept  up 
to  it;  never  so  much  as  to-night  had  the  Prince  felt 
this.  He  would  have  been  uncomfortable,  as  these 
quiet  expressions  passed,  had  the  case  not  been  guar 
anteed  for  him  by  the  intensity  of  his  accord  with 
Charlotte.  It  was  impossible  that  he  should  n't  now 
and  again  meet  Charlotte's  eyes,  as  it  was  also  visible 
that  she  now  and  again  met  her  husband's.  For 
her  as  well,  in  all  his  pulses,  he  felt  the  conveyed  im 
pression.  It  put  them,  it  kept  them  together,  through 
the  vain  show  of  their  separation ;  made  the  two  other 
faces,  made  the  whole  lapse  of  the  evening,  the  people, 
the  lights,  the  flowers,  the  pretended  talk,  the  ex 
quisite  music,  a  mystic  golden  bridge  between  them, 
strongly  swaying  and  sometimes  almost  vertiginous, 
for  that  intimacy  of  which  the  sovereign  law  would 
be  the  vigilance  of  "  care,"  would  be  never  rashly  to 
forget  and  never  consciously  to  wound. 


VII 


THE  main  interest  of  these  hours  for  us,  however, 
will  have  been  in  the  way  the  Prince  continued  to 
know,  during  a  particular  succession  of  others,  separ 
ated  from  the  evening  in  Eaton  Square  by  a  short 
interval,  a  certain  persistent  aftertaste.  This  was  the 
lingering  savour  of  a  cup  presented  to  him  by  Fanny 
Assingham's  hand  while,  dinner  done,  the  clustered 
quartette  in  the  music-room  kept  their  ranged  com 
panions  moved  if  one  would,  but  conveniently  mo 
tionless.  Mrs.  Assingham  contrived,  after  a  couple  of 
pieces,  to  convey  to  her  friend  that,  for  her  part,  she 
was  moved  —  by  the  genius  of  Brahms  —  beyond 
what  she  could  bear;  so  that,  without  apparent  delib 
eration,  she  had  presently  floated  away  at  the  young 
man's  side  to  such  a  distance  as  permitted  them  to 
converse  without  the  effect  of  disdain.  It  was  the 
twenty  minutes  enjoyed  with  her,  during  the  rest  of 
the  concert,  in  the  less  associated  electric  glare  of  one 
of  the  empty  rooms  —  it  was  their  achieved  and,  as 
he  would  have  said,  successful,  most  pleasantly  suc 
cessful,  talk  on  one  of  the  sequestered  sofas,  it  was 
this  that  was  substantially  to  underlie  his  conscious 
ness  of  the  later  occasion.  The  later  occasion,  then 
mere  matter  of  discussion,  had  formed  her  ground  for 
desiring  —  in  a  light  undertone  into  which  his  quick 
ear  read  indeed  some  nervousness  —  these  independ 
ent  words  with  him :  she  had  sounded,  covertly  but 

326 


THE  PRINCE 

distinctly,  by  the  time  they  were  seated  together,  the 
great  question  of  what  it  might  involve.  It  had  come 
out  for  him  before  anything  else,  and  so  abruptly  that 
this  almost  needed  an  explanation.  Then  the  abrupt 
ness  itself  had  appeared  to  explain  —  which  had 
introduced  in  turn  a  slight  awkwardness.  "Do  you 
know  that  they're  not,  after  all,  going  to  Matcham; 
so  that  if  they  don't  —  if  at  least  Maggie  does  n't  — 
you  won't,  I  suppose,  go  by  yourself?"  It  was,  as  I 
say,  at  Matcham,  where  the  event  had  placed  him, 
it  was  at  Matcham  during  the  Easter  days,  that  it 
most  befell  him,  oddly  enough,  to  live  over  inwardly, 
for  its  wealth  of  special  significance,  this  passage 
by  which  the  event  had  been  really  a  good  deal  de 
termined.  He  had  paid  first  and  last  many  an  Eng 
lish  country  visit ;  he  had  learned  even  from  of  old  to 
do  the  English  things  and  to  do  them  all  sufficiently 
in  the  English  way;  if  he  did  n't  always  enjoy  them 
madly  he  enjoyed  them  at  any  rate  as  much,  to 
all  appearance,  as  the  good  people  who  had  in  the 
night  of  time  unanimously  invented  them  and  who 
still,  in  the  prolonged  afternoon  of  their  good  faith, 
unanimously,  even  if  a  trifle  automatically,  practised 
them ;  yet  with  it  all  he  had  never  so  much  as  during 
such  sojourns  the  trick  of  a  certain  detached,  the 
amusement  of  a  certain  inward  critical,  life;  the  de 
termined  need,  while  apparently  all  participant,  of 
returning  upon  himself,  of  backing  noiselessly  in,  far 
in  again,  and  rejoining  there,  as  it  were,  that  part  of 
his  mind  that  was  not  engaged  at  the  front.  His  body, 
very  constantly,  was  engaged  at  the  front  —  in  shoot 
ing,  in  riding,  in  golfing,  in  walking,  over  the  fine 

327 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

diagonals  of  meadow-paths  or  round  the  pocketed 
corners  of  billiard-tables;  it  sufficiently,  on  the  whole, 
in  fact,  bore  the  brunt  of  bridge-playing,  of  break 
fasting,  lunching,  tea-drinking,  dining,  and  of  the 
nightly  climax  over  the  bottigliera,  as  he  called  it, 
of  the  bristling  tray;  it  met,  finally,  to  the  extent  of 
the  limited  tax  on  lip,  on  gesture,  on  wit,  most  of  the 
current  demands  of  conversation  and  expression. 
Therefore  something  of  him,  he  often  felt  at  these 
times,  was  left  out;  it  was  much  more  when  he  was 
alone  or  when  he  was  with  his  own  people  —  or  when 
he  was,  say,  with  Mrs.  Verver  and  nobody  else  — 
that  he  moved,  that  he  talked,  that  he  listened,  that 
he  felt,  as  a  congruous  whole. 

"English  society,"  as  he  would  have  said,  cut  him 
accordingly  in  two,  and  he  reminded  himself  often,  in 
his  relations  with  it,  of  a  man  possessed  of  a  shining 
star,  a  decoration,  an  order  of  some  sort,  something  so 
ornamental  as  to  make  his  identity  not  complete, 
ideally,  without  it,  yet  who,  finding  no  other  such  ob 
ject  generally  worn,  should  be  perpetually  and  the 
least  bit  ruefully  unpinning  it  from  his  breast  to  trans 
fer  it  to  his  pocket.  The  Prince's  shining  star  may, 
no  doubt,  have  been  nothing  more  precious  than  his 
private  subtlety;  but  whatever  the  object  he  just 
now  fingered  it  a  good  deal  out  of  sight  —  amounting 
as  it  mainly  did  for  him  to  a  restless  play  of  memory 
and  a  fine  embroidery  of  thought.  Something  had 
rather  momentously  occurred,  in  Eaton  Square,  during 
his  enjoyed  minutes  with  his  old  friend :  his  present 
perspective  made  definitely  clear  to  him  that  she  had 
plumped  out  for  him  her  first  little  lie.  That  took  on 


THE   PRINCE 

(and  he  could  have  scarce  said  why)  a  sharpness  of 
importance :  she  had  never  lied  to  him  before  —  if 
only  because  it  had  never  come  up  for  her,  properly, 
logically,  morally,  that  she  must.  As  soon  as  she  had 
put  to  him  the  question  of  what  he  would  do  —  by 
which  she  meant  of  what  Charlotte  would  also  do — in 
that  event  of  Maggie's  and  Mr.  Verver's  not  embrac 
ing  the  proposal  they  had  appeared  for  a  day  or  two 
resignedly  to  entertain;  as  soon  as  she  had  betrayed 
her  curiosity  as  to  the  line  the  other  pair,  so  left  to  them 
selves,  might  take,  a  desire  to  avoid  the  appearance  of 
at  all  too  directly  prying  had  become  marked  in  her. 
Betrayed  by  the  solicitude  of  which  she  had  already 
three  weeks  before  given  him  a  view,  she  had  been 
obliged  on  a  second  thought  to  name  intelligibly  a 
reason  for  her  appeal;  while  the  Prince,  on  his  side, 
had  had,  not  without  mercy,  his  glimpse  of  her  mo 
mentarily  groping  for  one  and  yet  remaining  unpro 
vided.  Not  without  mercy  because,  absolutely,  he  had 
on  the  spot,  in  his  friendliness,  invented  one  for  her 
use,  presenting  it  to  her  with  a  look  no  more  signi 
ficant  than  if  he  had  picked  up,  to  hand  back  to  her, 
a  dropped  flower.  "  You  ask  if  I  'm  likely  also  to  back 
out  then,  because  it  may  make  a  difference  in  what  you 
and  the  Colonel  decide  ? "  —  he  had  gone  as  far  as 
that  for  her,  fairly  inviting  her  to  assent,  though  not 
•'  having  had  his  impression,  from  any  indication  of- 
,  fered  him  by  Charlotte,  that  the  Assinghams  were 
really  in  question  for  the  large  Matcham  party.  The 
wonderful  thing  after  this  was  that  the  active  couple 
had  in  the  interval  managed  to  inscribe  themselves 
on  the  golden  roll;  an  exertion  of  a  sort  that,  to  do 

329 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

l,er  justice,  he  had  never  before  observed  Fanny  to 
make.  This  last  passage  of  the  chapter  but  proved 
after  all  with  what  success  she  could  work  when  she 
would. 

Once  launched,  himself,  at  any  rate,  as  he  had  been 
directed  by  all  the  terms  of  the  intercourse  between 
Portland  Place  and  Eaton  Square,  once  steeped  at 
Matcham  in  the  enjoyment  of  a  splendid  hospitality, 
he  found  everything,  for  his  interpretation,  for  his 
convenience,  fall  easily  enough  into  place ;  and  all  the 
more  that  Mrs.  Verver  was  at  hand  to  exchange  ideas 
and  impressions  with.  The  great  house  was  full  of 
people,  of  possible  new  combinations,  of  the  quickened 
play  of  possible  propinquity,  and  of  course  no  appear 
ance  was  less  to  be  cultivated  than  that  of  his  having 
sought  an  opportunity  to  foregather  with  his  friend 
at  a  safe  distance  from  their  respective  sposi.  There 
was  a  happy  boldness,  at  the  best,  in  their  mingling 
thus,  each  unaccompanied,  in  the  same  sustained 
sociability  —  just  exactly  a  touch  of  that  eccentricity 
of  associated  freedom  which  sat  so  lightly  on  the  im 
agination  of  the  relatives  left  behind.  They  were  ex 
posed  as  much  as  one  would  to  its  being  pronounced 
funny  that  they  should,  at  such  a  rate,  go  about  to 
gether  —  though  on  the  other  hand  this  consideration 
drew  relief  from  the  fact  that,  in  their  high  conditions 
and  with  the  easy  tradition,  the  almost  inspiring  allow 
ances,  of  the  house  in  question,  no  individual  line, 
however  freely  marked,  was  pronounced  anything 
more  than  funny.  Both  our  friends  felt  afresh,  as  they 
had  felt  before,  the  convenience  of  a  society  so  placed 
that  it  had  only  its  own  sensibility  to  consider  —  look- 

33° 


THE   PRINCE 

ing  as  it  did  well  over  the  heads  of  all  lower  growths; 
and  that  moreover  treated  its  own  sensibility  quite  as 
the  easiest,  friendliest,  most  informal  and  domestic 
ated  party  to  the  general  alliance.  What  any  one 
"thought"  of  any  one  else — above  all  of  any  one  else 
with  any  one  else — was  a  matter  incurring  in  these 
halls  so  little  awkward  formulation  that  hovering 
Judgement,  the  spirit  with  the  scales,  might  perfectly 
have  been  imaged  there  as  some  rather  snubbed  and 
subdued  but  quite  trained  and  tactful  poor  relation, 
of  equal,  of  the  properest,  lineage,  only  of  aspect 
a  little  dingy,  doubtless  from  too  limited  a  change  of 
dress,  for  whose  tacit  and  abstemious  presence,  never 
betrayed  by  a  rattle  of  her  rusty  machine,  a  room  in 
the  attic  and  a  plate  at  the  side  table  were  decently 
usual.  It  was  amusing,  in  such  lightness  of  air,  that 
the  Prince  should  again  present  himself  only  to  speak 
for  the  Princess,  again  so  unfortunately  unable  to 
leave  home;  and  that  Mrs.  Verver  should  as  regularly 
figure  as  an  embodied,  a  beautifully  deprecating 
apology  for  her  husband,  who  was  all  geniality  and 
humility  among  his  own  treasures,  but  as  to  whom 
the  legend  had  grown  up  that  he  could  n't  bear,  with 
the  height  of  his  standards  and  the  tone  of  the  com 
pany,  in  the  way  of  sofas  and  cabinets,  habitually 
kept  by  him,  the  irritation  and  depression  to  which 
promiscuous  visiting  even  at  pompous  houses  had 
been  found  to  expose  him.  That  was  all  right,  the 
noted  working  harmony  of  the  clever  son-in-law  and 
the  charming  stepmother,  so  long  as  the  relation  was, 
for  the  effect  in  question,  maintained  at  the  proper 
point  between  sufficiency  and  excess. 

331 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

What  with  the  noble  fairness  of  the  place,  mean 
while,  the  generous  mood  of  the  sunny  gusty  lusty 
English  April,  all  panting  and  heaving  with  impa 
tience  or  even  at  moments  kicking  and  crying  like 
some  infant  Hercules  who  would  n't  be  dressed ;  what 
with  these  things  and  the  bravery  of  youth  and  beauty, 
the  insolence  of  fortune  and  appetite  so  diffused 
among  his  fellow  guests  that  the  poor  Assinghams,  in 
their  comparatively  marked  maturity  and  their  com 
paratively  small  splendour,  were  the  only  approach  to 
a  false  note  in  the  concert,  the  stir  of  the  air  was  such, 
for  going,  in  a  degree,  to  one's  head,  that,  as  a  mere 
matter  of  exposure,  almost  grotesque  in  its  flagrancy, 
his  situation  resembled  some  elaborate  practical  joke 
carried  out  at  his  expense.  Every  voice  in  the  great 
bright  house  was  a  call  to  the  ingenuities  and  impun 
ities  of  pleasure;  every  echo  was  a  defiance  of  difficulty, 
doubt  or  danger;  every  aspect  of  the  picture,  a  glowing 
plea  for  the  immediate,  and  as  with  plenty  more  to 
come,  was  another  phase  of  the  spell.  For  a  world 
so  constituted  was  governed  by  a  spell,  that  of  the 
smile  of  the  gods  and  the  favour  of  the  powers ;  the 
only  handsome,  the  only  gallant,  in  fact  the  only  in 
telligent  acceptance  of  which  was  a  faith  in  its  guar 
antees  and  a  high  spirit  for  its  chances.  Its  demand  — 
to  that  the  thing  came  back  —  was  above  all  for  cour 
age  and  good  humour;  and  the  value  of  this  as  a  gen 
eral  assurance  —  that  is  for  seeing  one  through  at  the 
worst  —  had  n't  even  in  the  easiest  hours  of  his  old 
Roman  life  struck  the  Prince  so  convincingly.  His 
old  Roman  life  had  had  more  poetry,  no  doubt,  but  as 
he  looked  back  upon  it  now  it  seemed  to  hang  in  the 

332 


THE   PRINCE 

air  of  mere  iridescent  horizons,  to  have  been  loose  and 
vague  and  thin,  with  large  languorous  unaccountable 
blanks.  The  present  order,  as  it  spread  about  him, 
had  somehow  the  ground  under  its  feet,  and  a  trumpet 
in  its  ears,  and  a  bottomless  bag  of  solid  shining  Brit 
ish  sovereigns  —  which  was  much  to  the  point  —  in 
its  hand.  Courage  and  good  humour  therefore  were 
the  breath  of  the  day;  though  for  ourselves  at  least  it 
would  have  been  also  much  to  the  point  that  with 
Amerigo  really  the  innermost  effect  of  all  this  percep 
tive  ease  was  perhaps  a  strange  final  irritation.  He 
compared  the  lucid  result  with  the  extraordinary  sub 
stitute  for  perception  that  presided,  in  the  bosom  of 
his  wife,  at  so  contented  a  view  of  his  conduct  and 
course  —  a  state  of  mind  that  was  positively  like  a 
vicarious  good  conscience  cultivated  ingeniously  on 
his  behalf,  a  perversity  of  pressure  innocently  per 
sisted  in ;  and  this  wonder  of  irony  became  on  occa 
sion  too  intense  to  be  kept  wholly  to  himself.  It 
was  n't  that  at  Matcham  anything  particular,  any 
thing  monstrous,  anything  that  had  to  be  noticed,  per 
mitted  itself,  as  they  said,  to  "happen";  there  were 
only  odd  moments  when  the  breath  of  the  day,  as  it 
has  been  called,  struck  him  so  full  in  the  face  that  he 
broke  out  with  all  the  hilarity  of  "  What  indeed  would 
they  have  made  of  it?"  "They"  were  of  course 
Maggie  and  her  father,  moping  —  so  far  as  they  ever 
consented  to  mope  —  in  monotonous  Eaton  Square, 
but  placid  too  in  the  belief  that  they  knew  beautifully 
what  their  expert  companions  were  in  for.  They 
knew,  it  might  have  appeared  in  these  lights,  abso 
lutely  nothing  on  earth  worth  speaking  of  —  whether 

333 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

beautifully  or  cynically;  and  they  would  perhaps 
sometimes  be  a  little  less  trying  if  they  would  only 
once  for  all  peacefully  admit  that  knowledge  was  n't 
one  of  their  needs  and  that  they  were  in  fact  consti 
tutionally  inaccessible  to  it.  They  were  good  children, 
bless  their  hearts,  and  the  children  of  good  children; 
so  that  verily  the  Principino  himself,  as  less  consist 
ently  of  that  descent,  might  figure  to  the  fancy  as  the 
ripest  genius  of  the  trio. 

The  difficulty  was,  for  the  nerves  of  daily  inter 
course  with  Maggie  in  particular,  that  her  imagina 
tion  was  clearly  never  ruffled  by  the  sense  of  any 
anomaly.  The  great  anomaly  would  have  been  that 
her  husband,  or  even  that  her  father's  wife,  should 
prove  to  have  been  made,  for  the  long  run,  after  the 
pattern  set  from  so  far  back  to  the  Ververs.  If  one 
was  so  made  one  had  certainly  no  business  on  any 
terms  at  Matcham;  whereas  if  one  was  n't  one  had 
no  business  there  on  the  particular  terms  —  terms 
of  conformity  with  the  principles  of  Eaton  Square  — 
under  which  one  had  been  so  absurdly  dedicated. 
Deep  at  the  heart  of  that  roused  unrest  in  our  young 
man  which  we  have  had  to  content  ourselves  with 
calling  his  irritation  —  deep  in  the  bosom  of  this 
falsity  of  position  glowed  the  red  spark  of  his  inex 
tinguishable  sense  of  a  higher  and  braver  propriety. 
There  were  situations  that  were  ridiculous  but  that 
one  could  n't  yet  help,  as  for  instance  when  one's  wife 
chose,  in  the  most  usual  way,  to  make  one  so.  Pre 
cisely  here  however  was  the  difference;  it  had  taken 
poor  Maggie  to  invent  a  way  so  extremely  unusual  — 
yet  to  which  none  the  less  it  would  be  too  absurd  that 

334 


THE   PRINCE 

he  should  merely  lend  himself.  Being  thrust,  system 
atically,  with  another  woman,  and  a  woman  one 
happened,  by  the  same  token,  exceedingly  to  like, 
and  being  so  thrust  that  the  theory  of  it  seemed  to 
publish  one  as  idiotic  or  incapable  —  this  was  a  pre 
dicament  of  which  the  dignity  depended  all  on  one's 
own  handling.  What  was  supremely  grotesque  in  fact 
was  the  essential  opposition  of  theories  —  as  if  a 
galantuomo,  as  be  at  least  constitutionally  conceived 
galantuomini,  could  do  anything  but  blush  to  "go 
about"  at  such  a  rate  with  such  a  person  as  Mrs. 
Verver  in  a  state  of  childlike  innocence,  the  state  of 
our  primitive  parents  before  the  Fall  The  grotesque 
theory,  as  he  would  have  called  it,  was  perhaps  an 
odd  one  to  resent  with  violence,  and  he  did  it  —  also  as 
a  man  of  the  world  —  all  merciful  justice;  but  none 
the  less  assuredly  there  was  but  one  way  really  to 
mark,  and  for  his  companion  as  much  as  for  himself, 
the  commiseration  in  which  they  held  it.  Adequate 
comment  on  it  could  only  be  private,  but  it  could 
also  at  least  be  active,  and  of  rich  and  effectual  com 
ment  Charlotte  and  he  were  fortunately  alike  cap 
able.  Was  n't  this  consensus  literally  their  only  way 
not  to  be  ungracious  ?  It  was  positively  as  if  the  meas 
ure  of  their  escape  from  that  danger  were  given  by 
the  growth  between  them,  during  their  auspicious 
visit,  of  an  exquisite  sense  of  complicity. 


VIII 

HE  found  himself  therefore  saying  with  gaiety  even 
to  Fanny  Assingham,  for  their  common  concerned 
glance  at  Eaton  Square,  the  glance  that  was  so 
markedly  never,  as  it  might  have  been,  a  glance  at 
Portland  Place:  "What  would  our  cart  sposi  have 
made  of  it  here  ?  what  would  they,  you  know,  really  ? " 
—  which  overflow  would  have  been  reckless  if  already, 
and  surprisingly  perhaps  even  to  himself,  he  had  n't 
got  used  to  thinking  of  this  friend  as  a  person  in 
whom  the  element  of  protest  had  of  late  been  un- 
mistakeably  allayed.  He  exposed  himself  of  course 
to  her  replying:  "Ah  if  it  would  have  been  so  bad 
for  them  how  can  it  be  so  good  for  you  ? "  —  but, 
quite  apart  from  the  small  sense  the  question  would 
have  had  at  the  best,  she  appeared  already  to  unite 
with  him  in  confidence  and  cheer.  He  had  as  well  his 
view  —  or  at  least  a  partial  one  —  of  the  inner  spring 
of  this  present  comparative  humility,  which  was  all 
consistent  with  the  retractation  he  had  practically 
seen  her  make  after  Mr.  Verver's  last  dinner.  With 
out  diplomatising  to  do  so,  with  no  effort  to  square 
her,  none  to  bribe  her  to  an  attitude  for  which  he 
would  have  had  no  use  in  her  if  it  were  n't  sincere, 
he  yet  felt  how  he  both  held  her  and  moved  her  by  the 
felicity  of  his  taking  pity,  all  instinctively,  on  her  just 
discernible  depression.  By  just  so  much  as  he  guessed 
that  she  felt  herself,  as  the  slang  was,  out  of  it,  out  of 

336 


THE   PRINCE 

the  crystal  current  and  the  expensive  picture,  by  just 
so  much  had  his  friendship  charmingly  made  up  to 
her  from  hour  to  hour  for  the  penalties,  as  they  might 
have  been  grossly  called,  of  her  mistake.  Her  mis 
take  had  only  been,  after  all,  in  her  wanting  to  seem 
to  him  straight;  she  had  let  herself  in  for  being  —  as 
she  had  made  haste,  for  that  matter,  during  the  very 
first  half-hour  at  tea  to  proclaim  herself — the  sole 
and  single  frump  of  the  party.  The  scale  of  every 
thing  was  so  different  that  all  her  minor  values,  her 
quainter  graces,  her  little  local  authority,  her  humour 
and  her  wardrobe  alike,  for  which  it  was  enough  else 
where,  among  her  bons  amis,  that  they  were  hers,  dear 
Fanny  Assingham's  —  these  matters  and  others  would 
be  all  now  as  nought:  five  minutes  had  sufficed  to 
give  her  the  fatal  pitch.  In  Cadogan  Place  she  could 
always  at  the  worst  be  picturesque  —  for  she  habitu 
ally  spoke  of  herself  as  "local  to  Sloane  Street: 
whereas  at  Matcham  she  should  never  be  anything 
but  horrible.  And  it  all  would  have  come,  the  dis 
aster,  from  the  real  refinement  in  her  of  the  spirit 
of  friendship.  To  prove  to  him  that  she  was  n't  really 
watching  him  —  ground  for  which  would  have  been 
too  terribly  grave  —  she  had  followed  him  in  his  pur 
suit  of  pleasure :  so  she  might,  precisely,  mark  her 
detachment.  This  was  handsome  trouble  for  her  to 
take  —  the  Prince  could  see  it  all :  it  was  n't  a  shade  of 
interference  that  a  good-natured  man  would  visit  on 
her.  So  he  did  n't  even  say,  when  she  told  him  how 
frumpy  she  knew  herself,  how  frumpy  her  very  maid, 
odiously  going  back  on  her,  rubbed  it  into  her,  night 
and  morning,  with  unsealed  eyes  and  lips,  that  she 

337 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

now  knew  her  —  he  did  n't  then  say  "Ah  see  what 
you  've  done :  is  n't  it  rather  your  own  fault  ? "  He 
behaved  differently  altogether:  eminently  distin 
guished  himself — for  she  told  him  she  had  never 
seen  him  so  universally  distinguished  —  he  yet  dis 
tinguished  her  in  her  obscurity  or  in  what  was  worse, 
her  objective  absurdity,  and  frankly  invested  her  with 
her  absolute  value,  surrounded  her  with  all  the  im 
portance  of  her  wit.  That  wit,  as  discriminated  from 
stature  and  complexion,  a  sense  for  "bridge"  and  a 
credit  for  pearls,  could  have  importance  was  mean 
while  but  dimly  perceived  at  Matcham;  so  that  his 
"niceness"  to  her  —  she  called  it  only  niceness,  but 
it  brought  tears  into  her  eyes  —  had  the  greatness 
of  a  general  as  well  as  of  a  special  demonstration. 

"She  understands,"  he  said  as  a  comment  on  all 
this  to  Mrs.  Verver  —  "  she  understands  all  she  needs 
to  understand.  She  has  taken  her  time,  but  she  has  at 
last  made  it  out  for  herself:  she  sees  how  all  we  can 
desire  is  to  give  them  the  life  they  prefer,  to  sur 
round  them  with  the  peace  and  quiet,  and  above  all 
with  the  sense  of  security,  most  favourable  to  it.  She 
can't  of  course  very  well  put  it  to  us  that  we  have, 
so  far  as  she  is  concerned,  but  to  make  the  best  of 
our  circumstances;  she  can't  say  in  so  many  words 
'Don't  think  of  me,  for  I  too  must  make  the  best  of 
mine :  arrange  as  you  can,  only,  and  live  as  you  must.' 
I  don't  get  quite  that  from  her,  any  more  than  I  ask 
for  it.  But  her  tone  and  her  whole  manner  mean 
nothing  at  all  unless  they  mean  that  she  trusts  us 
to  take  as  watchful,  to  take  as  artful,  to  take  as  tender 
care,  in  our  way,  as  she  so  anxiously  takes  in  hers. 

338 


THE  PRINCE 

So  that  she's  —  well,"  the  Prince  wound  up,  "what 
you  may  call  practically  all  right."  Charlotte  in  fact 
however,  to  help  out  his  confidence,  did  n't  call  it 
anything;  return  as  he  might  to  the  lucidity,  the  im 
portance,  or  whatever  it  was,  of  this  lesson,  she  gave 
him  no  aid  toward  reading  it  aloud.  She  let  him  two 
or  three  times  over  spell  it  out  for  himself;  only  on  the 
eve  of  their  visit's  end  was  she  for  once  clear  or  direct 
in  response.  They  had  found  a  minute  together  in  the 
great  hall  of  the  house  during  the  half-hour  before  din 
ner;  this  easiest  of  chances  they  had  already  a  couple 
of  times  arrived  at  by  waiting  persistently  till  the  last 
other  loiterers  had  gone  to  dress  and  by  being  pre 
pared  themselves  to  dress  so  expeditiously  that  they 
might  a  little  later  on  be  among  the  first  to  appear 
in  festal  array.  The  hall  then  was  empty,  before  the 
army  of  rearranging  cushion-patting  housemaids  were 
marshalled  in,  and  there  was  a  place  by  the  forsaken 
fire,  at  one  end,  where  they  might  imitate  with  art  the 
unpremeditated.  Above  all  here,  for  the  snatched  in 
stants,  they  could  breathe  so  near  to  each  other  that 
the  interval  was  almost  engulfed  in  it  and  the  intensity 
both  of  the  union  and  the  caution  became  a  workable 
substitute  for  contact.  They  had  prolongations  of 
instants  that  counted  as  visions  of  bliss;  they  had  slow 
approximations  that  counted  as  long  caresses.  The 
quality  of  these  passages  in  truth  made  the  spoken 
word,  and  especially  the  spoken  word  about  other 
people,  fall  below  them;  so  that  our  young  woman's 
tone  had  even  now  a  certain  dryness.  "It's  very  good 
of  her,  my  dear,  to  trust  us.  But  what  else  can  she 
do?" 

339 


THE  GOLDEN   BOWL 

"Why  whatever  people  do  when  they  don't  trust 
Let  one  see  they  don't." 

"  But  let  whom  see  ? " 

"Well,  let  me,  say,  to  begin  with." 

"And  should  you  mind  that?" 

He  had  a  slight  show  of  surprise.  "Shouldn't 
you  ? " 

"Her  letting  you  see  —  ?  No,"  said  Charlotte; 
"the  only  thing  I  can  imagine  myself  minding  is  what 
you  yourself,  if  you  don't  look  out,  may  let  her  see." 
To  which  she  added  :  "  You  may  let  her  see,  you  know, 
that  you're  afraid." 

"  I  'm  only  afraid  of  you,  a  little,  at  moments,"  he 
presently  returned.  "But  I  shan't  let  Fanny  see 
that." 

It  was  clear  however  that  neither  the  limits  nor  the 
extent  of  Mrs.  Assingham's  vision  were  now  a  real 
concern  to  her,  and  she  gave  expression  to  this  as 
she  had  n't  even  yet  done.  "What  in  the  world  can 
she  do  against  us  ?  There 's  not  a  word  that  she 
can  breathe.  She's  helpless;  she  can't  speak;  she'd 
be  herself  the  first  to  be  dished  by  it."  And  then  as 
he  seemed  slow  to  follow :  "  It  all  comes  back  to  her. 
It  all  began  with  her.  Everything  from  the  first.  She 
introduced  you  to  Maggie.  She  made  your  marriage." 

The  Prince  might  have  had  his  moment  of  demur, 
but  at  this,  after  a  little,  as  with  a  smile  dim  but  deep, 
he  came  on.  "Mayn't  she  also  be  said  a  good  dear 
to  have  made  yours  ?  That  was  intended,  I  think, 
was  n't  it  ?  for  a  kind  of  rectification." 

Charlotte,  on  her  side,  for  an  instant,  hesitated; 
then  she  was  prompter  still.  "  I  don't  mean  there  was 

340 


THE   PRINCE 

anything  to  rectify;  everything  was  as  it  had  to  be, 
and  I  'm  not  speaking  of  how  she  may  have  been  con 
cerned  for  you  and  me.  I  'm  speaking  of  how  she  took, 
in  her  way,  each  time,  their  lives  in  hand,  and  how 
therefore  that  ties  her  up  to-day.  She  can't  go  to 
them  and  say  *  It 's  very  awkward  of  course,  you  poor 
dear  things,  but  I  was  frivolously  mistaken." 

He  took  it  in  still,  with  his  long  look  at  her.  "All 
the  more  that  she  was  n't.  She  was  right.  Every 
thing 's  right,"  he  went  on,  "and  everything  will 
stay  so." 

"Then  that's  all  I  say." 

But  he  worked  it  out,  for  the  deeper  satisfaction, 
even  to  superfluous  lucidity.  "We're  happy  —  and 
they're  happy.  What  more  does  the  position  admit 
of?  What  more  need  Fanny  Assingham  want?" 

"Ah  my  dear,"  said  Charlotte,  "it's  not  I  who  say 
that  she  need  want  anything.  I  only  say  that  she's 
fixed,  that  she  must  stand  exactly  where  everything 
has,  by  her  own  act,  placed  her.  It's  you  who  have 
seemed  haunted  with  the  possibility  for  her  of  some 
injurious  alternative,  something  or  other  we  must  be 
prepared  for."  And  she  had  with  her  high  reasoning 
a  strange  cold  smile.  "We  are  prepared  —  for  any 
thing,  for  everything;  and  as  we  are,  practically,  so 
she  must  take  us.  She's  condemned  to  consistency; 
she 's  doomed,  poor  thing,  to  a  genial  optimism.  That, 
luckily  for  her  however,  is  very  much  the  law  of  her 
nature.  She  was  born  to  soothe  and  to  smooth.  Now 
then  therefore,"  Mrs.  Verver  gently  laughed,  "she 
has  the  chance  of  her  life ! " 

"So  that  her  present  professions  may  even  at  the 
341 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

best  not  be  sincere  ?  —  may  be  but  a  mask  for  doubts 
and  fears  and  for  gaining  time  ? " 

The  Prince  had  looked,  with  the  question,  as  if  this 
again  could  trouble  him,  and  it  determined  in  his  com 
panion  a  slight  impatience.  "You  keep  talking  about 
such  things  as  if  they  were  our  affair  at  all.  I  feel 
at  any  rate  that  I  've  nothing  to  do  with  her  doubts 
and  fears  or  with  anything  she  may  feel.  She  must 
arrange  all  that  for  herself.  It's  enough  for  me  that 
she'll  always  be  of  necessity  much  more  afraid  for 
herself,  really,  either  to  see  or  to  speak,  than  we  should 
be  to  have  her  do  it  even  if  we  were  the  idiots  and 
cowards  we  are  n't."  And  Charlotte's  face,  with  these 
words  —  to  the  mitigation  of  the  slightly  hard  ring 
there  might  otherwise  have  been  in  them  —  fairly 
lightened,  softened,  shone  out.  It  reflected  as  really 
never  yet  the  rare  felicity  of  their  luck.  It  made  her 
look  for  the  moment  as  if  she  had  actually  pronounced 
that  word  of  unpermitted  presumption  —  so  apt  is  the 
countenance,  as  with  a  finer  consciousness  than  the 
tongue,  to  betray  a  sense  of  this  particular  lapse.  She 
might  indeed  the  next  instant  have  seen  her  friend 
wince,  in  advance,  at  her  use  of  a  word  that  was 
already  on  her  lips ;  for  it  was  still  unmistakeable  with 
him  that  there  were  things  he  could  prize,  forms  of 
fortune  he  could  cherish,  without  at  all  proportion 
ately  liking  their  names.  Had  all  this,  however,  been 
even  completely  present  to  his  companion,  what  other 
term  could  she  have  applied  to  the  strongest  and 
simplest  of  her  ideas  but  the  one  that  exactly  fitted  it  ? 
She  applied  it  then,  though  her  own  instinct  moved 
her  at  the  same  time  to  pay  her  tribute  to  the  good 

342 


THE  PRINCE 

taste  from  which  they  had  n't  heretofore  by  a  hair's 
breadth  deviated.  "If  it  didn't  sound  so  vulgar  I 
should  say  that  we  're  —  fatally,  as  it  were  —  safe. 
Pardon  the  low  expression  —  since  it's  what  we 
happen  to  be.  We  're  so  because  they  are.  And  they  're 
so  because  they  can't  be  anything  else  from  the  mo 
ment  that,  having  originally  intervened  for  them, 
she  would  n't  now  be  able  to  bear  herself  if  she  did  n't 
keep  them  so.  That's  the  way  she's  inevitably  with 
us,"  said  Charlotte  over  her  smile.  "We  hang  essen 
tially  together." 

Well,  the  Prince  candidly  allowed  she  did  bring  it 
home  to  him.  Every  way  it  worked  out.  "Yes,  I  see. 
We  hang  essentially  together." 

His  friend  had  a  shrug  —  a  shrug  that  had  a  grace. 
"  Cosa  volete?"  The  effect,  beautifully,  nobly,  was 
more  than  Roman.  "Ah  beyond  doubt  it's  a  case." 

He  stood  looking  at  her.  "  It 's  a  case.  There  can't," 
he  said,  "have  been  many." 

"  Perhaps  never,  never,  never  any  other.  That,"  she 
smiled,  "  I  confess  I  should  like  to  think.  Only  ours." 

"Only  ours  —  most  probably.  Speriamo"  To 
which,  as  after  hushed  connexions,  he  presently 
added:  "Poor  Fanny!"  But  Charlotte  had  already 
with  a  start  and  a  warning  hand  turned  from  a  glance 
at  the  clock.  She  sailed  away  to  dress,  while  he 
watched  her  reach  the  staircase.  His  eyes  followed 
her  till,  with  a  simple  swift  look  round  at  him,  she 
vanished.  Something  in  the  sight  however  appeared 
to  have  renewed  the  spring  of  his  last  exclamation, 
which  he  breathed  again  upon  the  air.  "Poor,  poor 
Fanny!" 

343 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

It  was  to  prove  on  the  morrow  quite  consistent  with 
the  spirit  of  these  words  that,  the  party  at  Matcham 
breaking  up  and  multitudinously  dispersing,  he  should 
be  able  to  meet  the  question  of  the  social  side  of  the 
process  of  returning  to  whence  he  had  come  with  due 
presence  of  mind.  It  was  impossible,  for  reasons,  that 
he  should  travel  to  town  with  the  Assinghams;  it  was 
impossible  for  the  same  reasons  that  he  should  travel 
to  town  save  in  the  conditions  that  he  had  for  the  last 
twenty-four  hours  been  privately,  and  it  might  have 
been  said  profoundly,  thinking  out.  The  result  of  his 
thought  was  already  precious  to  him,  and  this  put  at 
his  service,  he  sufficiently  believed,  the  right  tone  for 
disposing  of  his  elder  friend's  suggestion,  an  assump 
tion  in  fact  equally  full  and  mild,  that  he  and  Char 
lotte  would  conveniently  take  the  same  train  and 
occupy  the  same  compartment  as  the  Colonel  and 
herself.  The  extension  of  the  idea  to  Mrs.  Verver 
had  been  precisely  a  part  of  Mrs.  Assingham's  mild 
ness,  and  nothing  could  better  have  characterised  her 
sense  for  social  shades  than  her  easy  perception  that 
the  gentleman  from  Portland  Place  and  the  lady  from 
Eaton  Square  might  now  confess,  quite  without  in 
discretion,  to  simultaneity  of  movement.  She  had 
made,  for  the  four  days,  no  direct  appeal  to  the  latter 
personage,  but  the  Prince  was  accidental  witness  of 
her  taking  a  fresh  start  at  the  moment  the  company 
were  about  to  scatter  for  the  last  night  of  their  stay. 
There  had  been,  at  this  climax,  the  usual  preparatory 
talk  about  hours  and  combinations,  in  the  midst  of 
which  poor  Fanny  gently  approached  Mrs.  Verver. 
She  said  "You  and  the  Prince,  love"  —  quite,  appar- 

344 


THE  PRINCE 

ently,  without  blinking;  she  took  for  granted  their 
public  withdrawal  together;  she  remarked  that  she 
and  Bob  were  alike  ready,  in  the  interest  of  sociabil 
ity,  to  take  any  train  that  would  make  them  all  one 
party.  "I  feel  really  as  if  all  this  time  I  had  seen 
nothing  of  you  "  —  that  gave  an  added  grace  to  the 
candour  of  the  dear  thing's  approach.  But  just  then 
it  was  on  the  other  hand  that  the  young  man  found 
himself  borrow  most  effectively  the  secret  of  the  right 
tone  for  doing  as  he  preferred.  His  preference  had 
during  the  evening  not  failed  of  occasion  to  press  him 
with  mute  insistences;  practically  without  words, 
without  any  sort  of  straight  telegraphy,  it  had  arrived 
at  a  felt  identity  with  Charlotte's  own.  She  spoke 
all  for  their  friend  while  she  answered  their  friend's 
question,  but  she  none  the  less  signalled  to  him  as 
definitely  as  if  she  had  fluttered  a  white  handkerchief 
from  a  window.  "It's  awfully  sweet  of  you,  darling 
—  our  going  together  would  be  charming.  But  you 
must  n't  mind  us  —  you  must  suit  yourselves :  we  've 
settled,  Amerigo  and  I,  to  stay  over  till  after  luncheon." 
Amerigo,  with  the  chink  of  this  gold  in  his  ear, 
turned  straight  away,  so  as  not  to  be  instantly  ap 
pealed  to;  and  for  the  very  emotion  of  the  wonder, 
furthermore,  of  what  divination  may  achieve  when 
winged  by  a  community  of  passion.  Charlotte  had 
uttered  the  exact  plea  that  he  had  been  keeping  ready 
for  the  same  foreseen  necessity,  and  had  uttered  it 
simply  as  a  consequence  of  their  deepening  unex 
pressed  need  of  each  other  and  without  the  passing 
between  them  of  a  word.  He  had  n't,  God  knew,  to 
take  it  from  her  —  he  was  too  conscious  of  what  he 

345 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

wanted;  but  the  lesson  for  him  was  in  the  straight 
clear  tone  that  Charlotte  could  thus  distil,  in  the  per 
fect  felicity  of  her  adding  no  explanation,  no  touch  for 
plausibility,  that  she  was  n't  strictly  obliged  to  add, 
and  in  the  truly  superior  way  in  which  women  so 
situated  express  and  distinguish  themselves.  She  had 
answered  Mrs.  Assingham  quite  adequately;  she 
had  n't  spoiled  it  by  a  reason  a  scrap  larger  than  the 
smallest  that  would  serve,  and  she  had,  above  all, 
thrown  off,  for  his  stretched  but  covered  attention,  an 
image  that  flashed  like  a  mirror  played  at  the  face  of 
the  sun.  The  measure  of  everything,  to  all  his  sense 
at  these  moments,  was  in  it  —  the  measure  especially 
of  the  thought  that  had  been  growing  with  him  a  posi 
tive  obsession  and  that  began  to  throb  as  never  yet 
under  this  brush  of  her  having,  by  perfect  parity  of 
imagination,  the  match  for  it.  His  whole  conscious 
ness  had  by  this  time  begun  almost  to  ache  with  a 
truth  of  an  exquisite  order,  at  the  glow  of  which  she 
too  had  so  unmistakeably  then  been  warming  herself 
—  the  truth  that  the  occasion  constituted  by  the  last 
few  days  could  n't  possibly,  save  by  some  poverty  of 
their  own,  refuse  them  some  still  other  and  still  greater 
beauty.  It  had  already  told  them,  with  an  hourly 
voice,  that  it  had  a  meaning  —  a  meaning  that  their 
associated  sense  was  to  drain  even  as  thirsty  lips, 
after  the  plough  through  the  sands  and  the  sight,  afar, 
of  the  palm-cluster,  might  drink  in  at  last  the  pro 
mised  well  in  the  desert.  There  had  been  beauty  day 
after  day,  and  there  had  been  for  the  spiritual  lips 
something  of  the  pervasive  taste  of  it ;  yet  it  was  all 
nevertheless  as  if  their  response  had  remained  below 

346 


THE   PRINCE 

their  fortune.  How  to  bring  it  by  some  brave  free  lift 
up  to  the  same  height  was  the  idea  with  which,  be 
hind  and  beneath  everything,  he  was  restlessly  occu 
pied,  and  in  the  exploration  of  which,  as  in  that  of  the 
sun-chequered  greenwood  of  romance,  his  spirit  thus, 
at  the  opening  of  a  vista,  met  hers.  They  were  already 
from  that  moment  so  hand-in-hand  in  the  place  that 
he  found  himself  making  use  five  minutes  later  of 
exactly  the  same  tone  as  Charlotte's  for  telling  Mrs. 
Assingham  that  he  was  likewise  in  the  matter  of  the 
return  to  London  sorry  for  what  might  n't  be. 

This  had  become  of  a  sudden  the  simplest  thing  in 
the  world  —  the  sense  of  which  moreover  seemed 
really  to  amount  to  a  portent  that  he  should  feel  for 
evermore,  on  the  general  head,  conveniently  at  his 
ease  with  her.  He  went  in  fact  a  step  further  than 
Charlotte  —  put  the  latter  forward  as  creating  his 
necessity.  She  was  staying  over  luncheon  to  oblige 
their  hostess  —  as  a  consequence  of  which  he  must 
also  stay  to  see  her  decently  home.  He  must  deliver 
her  safe  and  sound,  he  felt,  in  Eaton  Square.  Regret 
as  he  might  too  the  difference  made  by  this  obliga 
tion,  he  frankly  did  n't  mind,  inasmuch  as,  over  and 
above  the  pleasure  itself,  his  scruple  would  certainly 
gratify  both  Mr.  Verver  and  Maggie.  They  never 
yet  had  absolutely  and  entirely  learned,  he  even  found 
deliberation  to  intimate,  how  little  he  really  neglected 
the  first  —  as  it  seemed  nowadays  quite  to  have  be 
come  —  of  his  domestic  duties :  therefore  he  still 
constantly  felt  how  little  he  must  remit  his  effort  to 
make  them  remark  it.  To  which  he  added  with  equal 
lucidity  that  they  would  return  in  time  for  dinner, 

347 


THE  GOLDEN   BOWL 

and  if  he  did  n't,  as  a  last  word,  subjoin  that  it  would 
be  "lovely"  of  Fanny  to  find,  on  her  own  return,  a 
moment  to  go  to  Eaton  Square  and  report  them  as 
struggling  bravely  on,  this  was  n't  because  the  im 
pulse,  down  to  the  very  name  for  the  amiable  act, 
altogether  failed  to  rise.  His  inward  assurance,  his 
general  plan,  had  at  moments,  where  she  was  con 
cerned,  its  drops  of  continuity,  and  nothing  would 
less  have  pleased  him  than  that  she  should  suspect  in 
him,  however  tempted,  any  element  of  conscious 
"cheek."  But  he  was  always  —  that  was  really  the 
upshot  —  cultivating  thanklessly  the  considerate  and 
the  delicate :  it  was  a  long  lesson,  this  unlearning, 
with  people  of  English  race,  all  the  little  superstitions 
that  accompany  friendship.  Mrs.  Assingham  herself 
was  the  first  to  say  that  she  would  unfailingly  "re 
port";  she  brought  it  out  in  fact,  he  thought,  quite 
wonderfully  —  having  attained  the  summit  of  the 
wonderful  during  the  brief  interval  that  had  separated 
her  appeal  to  Charlotte  from  this  passage  with  him 
self.  She  had  taken  the  five  minutes,  obviously,  amid 
the  rest  of  the  talk  and  the  movement,  to  retire  into 
her  tent  for  meditation  —  which  showed,  among 
several  things,  the  impression  Charlotte  had  made  on 
her.  It  was  from  the  tent  she  emerged  as  with  arms 
refurbished ;  though  who  indeed  could  say  if  the  man 
ner  in  which  she  now  met  him  spoke  most,  really, 
of  the  glitter  of  battle  or  of  the  white  waver  of  the 
flag  of  truce  ?  The  parley  was  short  either  way ;  the 
gallantry  of  her  offer  was  all  sufficient. 

"  I  '11  go  to  our  friends  then  —  I  '11  ask  for  luncheon. 
I  '11  tell  them  when  to  expect  you." 

348 


THE   PRINCE 

"That  will  be  charming.    Say  we're  all  right." 

"All  right  —  precisely.  I  can't  say  more,"  Mrs. 
Assingham  smiled. 

"No  doubt."  But  he  considered  as  for  the  possible 
importance  of  it.  "Neither  can  you,  by  what  I  seem 
to  feel,  say  less." 

"Oh  I  wont  say  less ! "  Fanny  laughed ;  with  which 
the  next  moment  she  had  turned  away.  But  they  had 
it  again,  not  less  bravely,  on  the  morrow,  after  break 
fast,  in  the  thick  of  the  advancing  carriages  and  the 
exchange  of  farewells.  "  I  think  I  '11  send  home  my 
maid  from  Euston,"  she  was  then  prepared  to  amend, 
"and  go  to  Eaton  Square  straight.  So  you  can  be 
easy." 

"Oh  I  think  we're  easy,"  the  Prince  returned. 
"Be  sure  to  say,  at  any  rate,  that  we're  bearing  up." 

"You're  bearing  up  —  good.  And  Charlotte  re 
turns  to  dinner  ? " 

"To  dinner.  We're  not  likely,  I  think,  to  make 
another  night  away." 

"Well  then  I  wish  you  at  least  a  pleasant  day." 

"Oh,"  he  laughed  as  they  separated,  "we  shall  do 
our  best  for  it ! "  —  after  which,  in  due  course,  with 
the  announcement  of  their  conveyance,  the  Assing- 
hams  rolled  off. 


IX 


IT  was  quite  for  the  Prince  after  this  as  if  the  view 
had  further  cleared;  so  that  the  half-hour  during 
which  he  strolled  on  the  terrace  and  smoked  —  the 
day  being  lovely  —  overflowed  with  the  plenitude 
of  its  particular  quality.  Its  general  brightness  was 
composed  doubtless  of  many  elements,  but  what 
shone  out  of  it  as  if  the  whole  place  and  time  had  been 
a  great  picture,  from  the  hand  of  genius,  presented  to 
him  as  a  prime  ornament  for  his  collection  and  all 
varnished  and  framed  to  hang  up  —  what  marked  it 
especially  for  the  highest  appreciation  was  his  extra 
ordinarily  unchallenged,  his  absolutely  appointed  and 
enhanced  possession  of  it.  Poor  Fanny  Assingham's 
challenge  amounted  to  nothing :  one  of  the  things  he 
thought  of  while  he  leaned  on  the  old  marble  balus 
trade  —  so  like  others  that  he  knew  in  still  more 
nobly-terraced  Italy  —  was  that  she  was  squared,  ail- 
conveniently  even  to  herself,  and  that,  rumbling  to 
ward  London  with  this  contentment,  she  had  become 
an  image  irrelevant  to  the  scene.  It  further  passed 
across  him  —  as  his  imagination  was,  for  reasons, 
during  the  time,  unprecedentedly  active  —  that  he 
had  after  all  gained  more  from  women  than  he  had 
ever  lost  by  them ;  there  appeared  so,  more  and  more, 
on  those  mystic  books  that  are  kept,  in  connexion 
with  such  commerce,  even  by  men  of  the  loosest 
business  habits,  a  balance  in  his  favour  that  he  could 

350 


THE  PRINCE 

pretty  well  as  a  rule  take  for  granted.  What  were 
they  doing  at  this  very  moment,  wonderful  creatures, 
but  trying  to  outdo  each  other  in  his  interest  ?  — 
from  Maggie  herself,  most  wonderful  in  her  way  of 
all,  to  his  hostess  of  the  present  hour,  into  whose  head 
it  had  so  inevitably  come  to  keep  Charlotte  on,  for 
particular  reasons,  and  who  had  asked  in  this  bene 
volent  spirit  why  in  the  world,  if  not  obliged,  with 
out  plausibility,  to  hurry,  her  husband's  son-in-law 
should  n't  wait  over  in  her  company.  He  would  at 
least  see,  Lady  Castledean  had  said,  that  nothing 
dreadful  should  happen  to  her  either  while  still  there 
or  during  the  exposure  of  the  run  to  town ;  and,  for 
that  matter,  if  they  exceeded  a  little  their  licence  it 
would  positively  help  them  to  have  done  so  together. 
Each  of  them  would  in  this  way  have  the  other 
comfortably  to  complain  of  at  home.  All  of  which, 
besides,  in  Lady  Castledean  as  in  Maggie,  in  Fanny 
Assingham  as  in  Charlotte  herself,  was  working  for 
him  without  provocation  or  pressure,  by  the  mere 
play  of  some  vague  sense  on  their  part  —  definite  and 
conscious  at  the  most  only  in  Charlotte  —  that  he 
was  n't,  as  a  nature,  as  a  character,  as  a  gentleman, 
in  fine,  below  his  remarkable  fortune. 

But  there  were  more  things  before  him  than  even 
these;  things  that  melted  together,  almost  indistin- 
guishably,  to  feed  his  sense  of  beauty.  If  the  outlook 
was  in  every  way  spacious  —  and  the  towers  of  three 
cathedrals,  in  different  counties,  as  had  been  pointed 
out  to  him,  gleamed  discernibly,  like  dim  silver,  in 
the  rich  sameness  of  tone  —  did  n't  he  somehow  the 
more  feel  it  so  because,  precisely,  Lady  Castledean 

351 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

had  kept  over  a  man  of  her  own,  and  that  this  offered 
a  certain  sweet  intelligibility  as  the  note  of  the  day  ? 
It  made  everything  fit;  above  all  it  diverted  him  to 
the  extent  of  keeping  up,  while  he  lingered  and 
waited,  his  meditative  smile.  She  had  detained  Char 
lotte  because  she  wished  to  detain  Mr.  Blint,  and  she 
could  n't  detain  Mr.  Blint,  disposed  though  he  clearly 
was  to  oblige  her,  without  spreading  over  the  act 
some  ampler  drapery.  Castledean  had  gone  up  to 
London;  the  place  was  all  her  own;  she  had  had  a 
fancy  for  a  quiet  morning  with  Mr.  Blint,  a  sleek  civil 
accomplished  young  man  —  distinctly  younger  than 
her  ladyship  —  who  played  and  sang  delightfully 
(played  even  "bridge"  and  sang  the  English-comic 
as  well  as  the  French-tragic),  and  the  presence  — 
which  really  meant  the  absence  —  of  a  couple  of 
other  friends,  if  they  were  happily  chosen,  would  make 
everything  all  right.  The  Prince  had  the  sense,  all 
good-humouredly,  of  being  happily  chosen,  and  it 
was  n't  spoiled  for  him  even  by  another  sense  that 
followed  in  its  train  and  with  which  during  his  life  in 
England  he  had  more  than  once  had  reflectively  to  deal : 
the  state  of  being  reminded  how  after  all,  as  an  out 
sider,  a  foreigner,  and  even  as  a  mere  representative 
husband  and  son-in-law,  he  was  so  irrelevant  to  the 
working  of  affairs  that  he  could  be  bent  on  occasion 
to  uses  comparatively  trivial.  No  other  of  her  guests 
would  have  been  thus  convenient  for  their  hostess; 
affairs,  of  whatever  sorts,  had  claimed,  by  early  trains, 
every  active  easy  smoothly-working  man,  each  in 
his  way  a  lubricated  item  of  the  great  social  political 
administrative  engrenage  —  claimed  most  of  all  Cas- 

352 


THE   PRINCE 

tledean  himself,  who  was  so  very  oddly,  given  the 
personage  and  the  type,  rather  a  large  item.  If  he, 
the  great  and  the  clever  Roman,  on  the  other  hand, 
had  an  affair,  it  was  n't  of  that  order;  it  was  of  the 
order  verily  that  he  had  been  reduced  to  as  to  a  not 
quite  glorious  substitute. 

It  marked  however  the  feeling  of  the  hour  with 
the  Prince  that  this  vision  of  being  "  reduced  "  inter 
fered  not  at  all  with  the  measure  of  his  actual  ease.  It 
kept  before  him  again  at  moments  the  so  familiar  fact 
of  his  sacrifices  —  down  to  the  idea  of  the  very  re- 
linquishment,  for  his  wife's  convenience,  of  his  real 
situation  in  the  world;  with  the  consequence  thus 
that  he  was,  in  the  last  analysis,  among  all  these  so 
often  inferior  people,  practically  held  cheap  and  made 
light  of.  But  though  all  this  was  sensible  enough 
there  was  a  spirit  in  him  that  could  rise  above  it,  a 
spirit  that  positively  played  with  the  facts,  with  all 
of  them;  from  that  of  the  droll  ambiguity  of  English 
relations  to  that  of  his  having  in  mind  something 
quite  beautiful  and  independent  and  harmonious, 
something  wholly  his  own.  He  could  n't  somehow 
take  Mr.  Blint  seriously  —  he  was  much  more  an  out 
sider,  by  the  larger  scale,  even  than  a  Roman  prince 
who  consented  to  be  in  abeyance.  Yet  it  was  past 
finding  out,  either,  how  such  a  woman  as  Lady  Cas- 
tledean  could  take  him  —  since  this  question  but  sank 
for  him  again  into  the  fathomless  depths  of  English 
equivocation.  He  knew  them  all,  as  was  said,  "  well " ; 
he  had  lived  with  them,  stayed  with  them,  dined, 
hunted,  shot  and  done  various  other  things  with  them ; 
but  the  number  of  questions  about  them  he  could  n't 

353 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

have  answered  had  much  rather  grown  than  shrunken, 
so  that  experience  struck  him  for  the  most  part  as 
having  left  in  him  but  one  residual  impression.  They 
did  n't  like  les  situations  nettes  —  that  was  all  he  was 
very  sure  of.  They  would  n't  have  them  at  any  price ; 
it  had  been  their  national  genius  and  their  national 
success  to  avoid  them  at  every  point.  They  called  it 
themselves,  with  complacency,  their  wonderful  spirit 
of  compromise  —  the  very  influence  of  which  actu 
ally  so  hung  about  him  here  from  moment  to  moment 
that  the  earth  and  the  air,  the  light  and  the  colour, 
the  fields  and  the  hills  and  the  sky,  the  blue-green 
counties  and  the  cold  cathedrals,  owed  to  it  every 
accent  of  their  tone.  Verily,  as  one  had  to  feel  in 
presence  of  such  a  picture,  it  had  succeeded ;  it  had 
made,  up  to  now,  for  that  seated  solidity  in  the  rich 
sea-mist  on  which  the  garish,  the  supposedly  envious, 
peoples  have  ever  cooled  their  eyes.  But  it  was  at 
the  same  time  precisely  why  even  much  initiation 
left  one  at  given  moments  so  puzzled  as  to  the  ele 
ment  of  staleness  in  all  the  freshness  and  of  freshness 
in  all  the  staleness,  of  innocence  in  the  guilt  and  of 
guilt  in  the  innocence.  There  were  other  marble  ter 
races,  sweeping  more  purple  prospects,  on  which  he 
would  have  known  what  to  think,  and  would  have 
enjoyed  thereby  at  least  the  small  intellectual  fillip  of 
a  discerned  relation  between  a  given  appearance  and 
a  taken  meaning.  The  enquiring  mind,  in  these  pre 
sent  conditions,  might,  it  was  true,  be  more  sharply 
challenged;  but  the  result  of  its  attention  and  its 
ingenuity,  it  had  unluckily  learned  to  know,  was  too 
often  to  be  confronted  with  a  mere  dead  wall,  a  lapse 

354 


THE  PRINCE 

of  logic,  a  confirmed  bewilderment.  And  moreover 
above  all  nothing  mattered,  in  the  relation  of  the  en 
closing  scene  to  his  own  consciousness,  but  its  very 
most  direct  bearings. 

Lady  Castledean's  dream  of  Mr.  Blint  for  the 
morning  was  doubtless  already,  with  all  the  spacious 
harmonies  re-established,  taking  the  form  of  "going 
over"  something  with  him,  at  the  piano,  in  one  of  the 
numerous  smaller  rooms  that  were  consecrated  to  the 
less  gregarious  uses;  what  she  had  wished  had  been 
effected  —  her  convenience  had  been  assured.  This 
made  him  however  ask  himself  the  more  where  Char 
lotte  was  —  since  he  did  n't  at  all  suppose  her  to  be 
making  a  tactless  third,  which  would  be  to  have  ac 
cepted  mere  spectatorship,  in  the  duet  of  their  com 
panions.  The  upshot  of  everything  for  him,  alike  of 
the  less  and  of  the  more,  was  that  the  exquisite  day 
bloomed  there  like  a  large  fragrant  flower  that  he  had 
only  to  gather.  But  it  was  to  Charlotte  he  wished  to 
make  the  offering,  and  as  he  moved  along  the  terrace, 
which  rendered  visible  parts  of  two  sides  of  the  house, 
he  looked  up  at  all  the  windows  that  were  open  to  the 
April  morning  and  wondered  which  of  them  would 
represent  his  friend's  room.  It  befell  thus  that  his 
question  was  after  no  long  time  answered;  he  saw 
Charlotte  appear  above  as  if  she  had  been  called  by 
the  pausing  of  his  feet  on  the  flags.  She  had  come 
to  the  sill,  on  which  she  leaned  to  look  down,  and  she 
remained  there  a  minute  smiling  at  him.  He  had 
been  immediately  struck  with  her  wearing  a  hat  and 
a  jacket — which  conduced  to  her  appearance  of  readi 
ness  not  so  much  to  join  him,  with  a  beautiful 

355 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

uncovered  head  and  a  parasol,  where  he  stood,  as  to 
take  with  him  some  larger  step  altogether.  The 
larger  step  had  been  since  the  evening  before  in 
tensely  in  his  own  mind,  though  he  had  n't  fully 
thought  out  even  yet  the  slightly  difficult  detail  of 
it;  but  he  had  had  no  chance,  such  as  he  needed,  to 
speak  the  definite  word  to  her,  and  the  face  she  now 
showed  affected  him  thereby  as  a  notice  that  she 
had  wonderfully  guessed  it  for  herself.  They  had 
these  identities  of  impulse  —  they  had  had  them  re 
peatedly  before;  and  if  such  unarranged  but  unerring 
encounters  gave  the  measure  of  the  degree  in  which 
people  were,  in  the  common  phrase,  meant  for  each 
other,  no  union  in  the  world  had  ever  been  more 
sweetened  with  Tightness.  What  in  fact  most  often 
happened  was  that  her  Tightness  went,  as  who  should 
say,  even  further  than  his  own;  they  were  conscious 
of  the  same  necessity  at  the  same  moment,  only  it 
was  she  who  as  a  general  thing  most  clearly  saw  her 
way  to  it.  Something  in  her  long  look  at  him  now 
out  of  the  old  grey  window,  something  in  the  very 
poise  of  her  hat,  the  colour  of  her  necktie,  the  pro 
longed  stillness  of  her  smile,  touched  into  sudden 
light  for  him  all  the  wealth  of  the  fact  that  he  could 
count  on  her.  He  had  his  hand  there,  to  pluck  it, 
on  the  open  bloom  of  the  day;  but  what  did  the  bright 
minute  mean  but  that  her  answering  hand  was  already 
intelligently  out  ?  So  therefore  while  the  minute 
lasted  it  passed  between  them  that  their  cup  was  full ; 
which  cup  their  very  eyes,  holding  it  fast,  carried  and 
steadied  and  began,  as  they  tasted  it,  to  praise.  He 
broke  however  after  a  moment  the  silence. 

356 


THE   PRINCE 

"It  only  wants  a  moon,  a  mandolin  and  a  little 
danger  to  be  a  serenade." 

"Ah  then,"  she  lightly  called  down,  "let  it  at  least 
have  this!"  With  which  she  detached  a  rich  white 
rosebud  from  its  company  with  another  in  the  front 
of  her  dress  and  flung  it  down  to  him. 

He  caught  it  in  its  fall,  fixing  her  again  after  she 
had  watched  him  place  it  in  his  buttonhole.  "Come 
down  quickly!"  he  said  in  an  Italian  not  loud  but 
deep. 

"  Vengo,  vengo  !  "  she  as  clearly,  but  more  lightly, 
tossed  out;  and  she  had  left  him  the  next  minute  to 
wait  for  her. 

He  came  along  the  terrace  again,  with  pauses  dur 
ing  which  his  eyes  rested,  as  they  had  already  often 
done,  on  the  brave  darker  wash  of  far-away  water- 
colour  that  represented  the  most  distant  of  the 
cathedral  towns.  This  place,  with  its  great  church 
and  its  high  accessibility,  its  towers  that  distinguish- 
ably  signalled,  its  English  history,  its  appealing  type, 
its  acknowledged  interest,  this  place  had  sounded  its 
name  to  him  half  the  night  through,  and  its  name  had 
become  but  another  name,  the  pronounceable  and 
convenient  one,  for  that  supreme  sense  of  things 
which  now  throbbed  within  him.  He  had  kept  saying 
to  himself  "Glo'ster,  Glo'ster,  Glo'ster,"  quite  as 
if  the  sharpest  meaning  of  all  the  years  just  ended 
were  intensely  expressed  in  it.  That  meaning  was 
really  that  his  situation  remained  quite  sublimely 
consistent  with  itself,  and  that  they  absolutely,  he 
and  Charlotte,  stood  there  together  in  the  very  lustre 
of  this  truth.  Every  present  circumstance  helped  to 

357 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

proclaim  it;  it  was  blown  into  their  faces  as  by  the 
lips  of  the  morning.  He  knew  why  he  had  from  the 
first  of  his  marriage  tried  with  such  patience  for 
such  conformity;  he  knew  why  he  had  given  up  so 
much  and  bored  himself  so  much ;  he  knew  why  he 
had  at  any  rate  gone  in,  on  the  basis  of  all  forms,  on 
the  basis  of  his  having  in  a  manner  sold  himself, 
for  a  situation  nette.  It  had  all  been  just  in  order 
that  his  —  well,  what  on  earth  should  he  call  it  but 
his  freedom  ?  —  should  at  present  be  as  perfect  and 
rounded  and  lustrous  as  some  huge  precious  pearl. 
He  had  n't  struggled  nor  snatched ;  he  was  taking  but 
what  had  been  given  him;  the  pearl  dropped  itself, 
with  its  exquisite  quality  and  rarity,  straight  into  his 
hand.  Here  precisely  it  was,  incarnate;  its  size  and 
its  value  grew  as  Mrs.  Verver  appeared,  afar  off,  in 
one  of  the  smaller  doorways.  She  came  toward  him 
in  silence  while  he  moved  to  meet  her ;  the  great  scale 
of  this  particular  front,  at  Matcham,  multiplied  thus, 
in  the  golden  morning,  the  stages  of  their  meeting 
and  the  successions  of  their  consciousness.  It  was  n't 
till  she  had  come  quite  close  that  he  produced  for  her 
his  "Glo'ster,  Glo'ster,  Glo'ster,"  and  his  "Look 
at  it  over  there ! " 

She  knew  just  where  to  look.  "Yes  —  is  n't  it  one 
of  the  best  ?  There  are  cloisters  or  towers  or  some 
thing."  And  her  eyes,  which,  though  her  lips  smiled, 
were  almost  grave  with  their  depths  of  acceptance, 
came  back  to  him.  "Or  the  tomb  of  some  old 
king." 

"We  must  see  the  old  king;  we  must  'do'  the 
cathedral,"  he  said;  "we  must  know  all  about  it.  If 

358 


THE  PRINCE 

we  could  but  take,"  he  exhaled,  "the  full  oppor 
tunity  ! "  And  then  while,  for  all  they  seemed  to  give 
him,  he  sounded  again  her  eyes :  "  I  feel  the  day  like 
a  great  gold  cup  that  we  must  somehow  drain  to 
gether." 

"I  feel  it,  as  you  always  make  me  feel  everything, 
just  as  you  do;  so  that  I  know  ten  miles  off  how  you 
feel!  But  do  you  remember,"  she  asked,  "apropos 
of  great  gold  cups,  the  beautiful  one,  the  real  one, 
that  I  offered  you  so  long  ago  and  that  you  would  n't 
have  ?  Just  before  your  marriage  "  —  she  brought  it 
back  to  him:  "the  gilded  crystal  bowl  in  the  little 
Bloomsbury  shop." 

"  Oh  yes ! "  —  but  it  took,  with  a  slight  surprise  on 
the  Prince's  part,  some  small  recollecting.  "The 
treacherous  cracked  thing  you  wanted  to  palm  off 
on  me,  and  the  little  swindling  Jew  who  understood 
Italian  and  who  backed  you  up !  But  I  feel  this  an 
occasion,"  he  immediately  added,  "and  I  hope  you 
don't  mean,"  he  smiled,  "that  as  an  occasion  it's 
also  cracked." 

They  spoke,  naturally,  more  low  than  loud,  over 
looked  as  they  were,  though  at  a  respectful  distance, 
by  tiers  of  windows;  but  it  made  each  find  in  the 
other's  voice  a  taste  as  of  something  slowly  and  deeply 
absorbed.  "Don't  you  think  too  much  of  'cracks' 
and  are  n't  you  too  afraid  of  them  ?  I  risk  the  cracks," 
said  Charlotte,  "and  I  've  often  recalled  the  bowl  and 
the  little  swindling  Jew,  wondering  if  they  've  parted 
company.  He  made,"  she  said,  "a  great  impression 
on  me." 

"  Well,  you  also,  no  doubt,  made  a  great  impression 

359 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

on  him,  and  I  dare  say  that  if  you  were  to  go  back  to 
him  you'd  find  he  has  been  keeping  that  treasure  for 
you.  But  as  to  cracks,"  the  Prince  went  on  —  "what 
did  you  tell  me  the  other  day  you  prettily  call  them 
in  English  ?  *  rifts  within  the  lute '  ?  —  risk  them  as 
much  as  you  like  for  yourself,  but  don't  risk  them  for 
me/*  He  spoke  it  in  all  the  gaiety  of  his  just  barely- 
tremulous  serenity.  "  I  go,  as  you  know,  by  my  super 
stitions.  And  that's  why,"  he  said,  "I  know  where 
we  are.  They're  every  one  to-day  on  our  side." 

Resting  on  the  parapet  toward  the  great  view  she 
was  silent  a  little,  and  he  saw  the  next  moment  that 
her  eyes  were  closed.  "I  go  but  by  one  thing."  Her 
hand  was  on  the  sun-warmed  stone;  so  that,  turned 
as  they  were  away  from  the  house,  he  put  his  own 
upon  it  and  covered  it.  "I  go  by  you"  she  said. 
"I  go  by  you." 

So  they  remained  a  moment,  till  he  spoke  again 
with  a  gesture  that  matched.  "What's  really  our 
great  necessity,  you  know,  is  to  go  by  my  watch. 
It's  already  eleven  "  —  he  had  looked  at  the  time;  "so 
that  if  we  stop  here  to  luncheon  what  becomes  of 
our  afternoon  ? " 

To  this  Charlotte's  eyes  opened  straight.  "There's 
not  the  slightest  need  of  our  stopping  here  to  lunch 
eon.  Don't  you  see,"  she  asked,  "how  I'm  ready?" 

He  had  taken  it  in,  but  there  was  always  more  and 
more  of  her.  "  You  mean  you  *ve  arranged  —  ? " 

"It's  easy  to  arrange.  My  maid  goes  up  with  my 
things.  You've  only  to  speak  to  your  man  about 
yours,  and  they  can  go  together." 

"You  mean  we  can  leave  at  once?" 
360 


She  let  him  have  it  all.  "One  of  the  carriages, 
about  which  I  spoke,  will  already  have  come  back 
for  us.  If  your  superstitions  are  on  our  side,"  she 
smiled,  "so  my  arrangements  are,  and  I'll  back  my 
support  against  yours." 

"Then  you  had  thought,"  he  wondered,  "about 
Gloucester  ? " 

She  hesitated  —  but  it  was  only  her  way.  "  I 
thought  you  would  think.  We  have,  thank  goodness, 
these  harmonies.  They  're  food  for  superstition  if 
you  like.  It's  beautiful,"  she  went  on,  "that  it  should 
be  Gloucester;  'Glo'ster  Glo'ster,'  as  you  say,  making 
it  sound  like  an  old  song.  However,  I  'm  sure  '  Glo'ster 
Glo'ster'  will  be  charming,"  she  still  added;  "we  shall 
be  able  easily  to  lunch  there,  and,  with  our  luggage 
and  our  servants  off  our  hands,  we  shall  have  at  least 
three  or  four  hours.  We  can  wire,"  she  wound  up, 
"from  there." 

Ever  so  quietly  she  had  brought  it,  as  she  had 
thought  it,  all  out,  and  it  had  to  be  as  covertly  that 
he  let  his  appreciation  expand.  "Then  Lady  Castle- 
dean  —  ?" 

"Does  n't  dream  of  our  staying." 

He  took  it,  but  thinking  yet.  "Then  what  does  she 
dream  —  ? " 

"Of  Mr.  Blint,  poor  dear;  of  Mr.  Blint  only."  Her 
smile  for  him  —  for  the  Prince  himself — was  free. 
"  Have  I  positively  to  tell  you  that  she  does  n't  want 
us  ?  She  only  wanted  us  for  the  others  —  to  show 
she  was  n't  left  alone  with  him.  Now  that  that 's  done 
and  that  they've  all  gone  she  of  course  knows  for 
herself  —  !" 

361 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"'Knows'  ?"  the  Prince  vaguely  echoed. 

"Why  that  we  like  cathedrals;  that  we  inevitably 
stop  to  see  them,  or  go  round  to  take  them  in,  when 
ever  we've  a  chance;  that  it's  what  our  respective 
families  quite  expect  of  us  and  would  be  disappointed 
for  us  to  fail  of.  This,  as  forestieri"  Mrs.  Verver  pur 
sued,  "would  be  our  pull  —  if  our  pull  were  n't  indeed 
so  great  all  round." 

He  could  only  keep  his  eyes  on  her.  "And  have 
you  made  out  the  very  train  —  ? " 

"The  very  one.  Paddington  —  the  6.50  'in.'  That 
gives  us  oceans;  we  can  dine,  at  the  usual  hour,  at 
home;  and  as  Maggie  will  of  course  be  in  Eaton 
Square  I  hereby  invite  you." 

For  a  while  he  still  but  looked  at  her;  it  was  a 
minute  before  he  spoke.  "Thank  you  very  much. 
With  pleasure."  To  which  he  in  a  moment  added: 
"  But  the  train  for  Gloucester  ? " 

"A  local  one  —  11.22;  with  several  stops,  but  doing 
it  a  good  deal,  I  forget  how  much,  within  the  hour. 
So  that  we've  time.  Only,"  she  said,  "we  must  em 
ploy  our  time." 

He  roused  himself  as  from  the  mere  momentary 
spell  of  her;  he  looked  again  at  his  watch  while  they 
moved  back  to  the  door  through  which  she  had  ad 
vanced.  But  he  had  also  again  questions  and  stops  — 
all  as  for  the  mystery  and  the  charm.  "You  looked  it 
up  —  without  my  having  asked  you  ? " 

"Ah  my  dear,"  she  laughed,  "I've  seen  you  with 
Bradshaw!  It  takes  Anglo-Saxon  blood." 

"'Blood'?"  he  echoed.  "You've  that  of  every 
race!"  It  kept  her  before  him.  "You're  terrible." 

362 


THE  PRINCE 

Well,  he  could  put  it  as  he  liked.  "  I  know  the  name 
of  the  inn." 

"What  is  it  then?" 

"There  are  two  —  you '11  see.  But  I  Ve  chosen  the 
right  one.  And  I  think  I  remember  the  tomb,"  she 
smiled. 

"Oh  the  tomb  — !"  Any  tomb  would  do  for  him. 
"  But  I  mean  I  had  been  keeping  my  idea  so  cleverly 
for  you  while  there  you  already  were  with  it." 

"  You  had  been  keeping  it '  for '  me  as  much  as  you 
like.  But  how  do  you  make  out,"  she  asked,  "that 
you  were  keeping  it  from  me  ? " 

"  I  don't  —  now.  How  shall  I  ever  keep  anything 
—  some  day  when  I  shall  wish  to  ? " 

"Ah  for  things  I  may  n't  want  to  know  I  promise 
you  shall  find  me  stupid."  They  had  reached  their 
door,  where  she  herself  paused  to  explain.  "These 
days,  yesterday,  last  night,  this  morning,  I  Ve  wanted 
everything." 

Well,  it  was  all  right.  "You  shall  have  everything." 


X 


FANNY,  on  her  arrival  in  town,  carried  out  her  second 
idea,  dispatching  the  Colonel  to  his  club  for  luncheon 
and  packing  her  maid  into  a  cab,  for  Cadogan  Place, 
with  the  variety  of  their  effects.  The  result  of  this 
for  each  of  the  pair  was  a  state  of  occupation  so  un 
broken  that  the  day  practically  passed  without  fresh 
contact  between  them.  They  dined  out  together, 
but  it  was  both  in  going  to  their  dinner  and  in  coming 
back  that  they  appeared  on  either  side  to  have  least 
to  communicate.  Fanny  was  wrapped  in  her  thoughts 
still  more  closely  than  in  the  lemon-coloured  mantle 
that  protected  her  bare  shoulders,  and  her  husband, 
with  her  silence  to  deal  with,  showed  himself  not  less 
disposed  than  usual,  when  so  challenged,  to  hold  up, 
as  he  would  have  said,  his  end  of  it.  They  had  in 
general  in  these  days  longer  pauses  and  more  abrupt 
transitions ;  in  one  of  which  latter  they  found  them 
selves,  for  a  climax,  launched  at  midnight.  Mrs. 
Assingham,  rather  wearily  housed  again,  ascended 
to  the  first  floor,  there  to  sink  overburdened,  on  the 
landing  outside  the  drawing-room,  into  a  great  gilded 
Venetian  chair  —  of  which  at  first  however  she  but 
made,  with  her  brooding  face,  a  sort  of  throne  of 
meditation.  She  would  thus  have  recalled  a  little, 
with  her  so  free  orientalism  of  type,  the  immemorially 
speechless  Sphinx  about  at  last  to  become  articulate. 
The  Colonel,  not  unlike,  on  his  side,  some  old  pilgrim 

364 


of  the  desert  camping  at  the  foot  of  that  monument, 
went  by  way  of  reconnoissance  into  the  drawing- 
room.  He  visited  according  to  his  wont  the  windows 
and  their  fastenings;  he  cast  round  the  place  the  eye 
all  at  once  of  the  master  and  the  manager,  the  com 
mandant  and  the  rate-payer;  then  he  came  back  to 
his  wife,  before  whom  for  a  moment  he  stood  wait 
ing.  But  she  herself  continued  for  a  time  to  wait, 
only  looking  up  at  him  inscrutably.  There  was  in 
these  minor  manoeuvres  and  conscious  patiences 
something  of  a  suspension  of  their  old  custom  of  di 
vergent  discussion,  that  intercourse  by  misunderstand 
ing  which  had  grown  so  clumsy  now.  This  familiar 
pleasantry  seemed  to  desire  to  show  it  could  yield  on 
occasion  to  any  clear  trouble;  though  it  was  also 
sensibly  and  just  incoherently  in  the  air  that  no 
trouble  was  at  present  to  be  vulgarly  recognised  as 
clear. 

There  might,  for  that  matter,  even  have  been  in 
Mrs.  Assingham's  face  a  mild  perception  of  some 
finer  sense  —  a  sense  for  his  wife's  situation,  and  the 
very  situation  she  was,  oddly  enough,  about  to  repu 
diate  —  that  she  had  fairly  caused  to  grow  in  him. 
But  it  was  a  flower  to  breathe  upon  gently,  and  this 
was  very  much  what  she  finally  did.  She  knew  he 
needed  no  telling  that  she  had  given  herself  all  the 
afternoon  to  her  friends  in  Eaton  Square,  and  that 
her  doing  so  would  have  been  but  the  prompt  result 
of  impressions  gathered,  in  quantities,  in  brimming 
baskets,  like  the  purple  grapes  of  the  vintage,  at 
Matcham;  a  process  surrounded  by  him,  while  it  so 
unmistakeably  went  on,  with  abstentions  and  discre- 

365 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

tions  that  might  almost  have  counted  as  solemnities. 
The  solemnities,  at  the  same  time,  had  committed 
him  to  nothing  —  to  nothing  beyond  this  confession 
itself  of  a  consciousness  of  deep  waters.  She  had  been 
out  on  these  waters  for  him,  visibly;  and  his  tribute  to 
the  fact  had  been  his  keeping  her,  even  if  without  a 
word,  well  in  sight.  He  had  n't  quitted  for  an  hour, 
during  her  adventure,  the  shore  of  the  mystic  lake; 
he  had  on  the  contrary  stationed  himself  where  she 
could  signal  to  him  at  need.  Her  need  would  have 
arisen  if  the  planks  of  her  bark  had  parted  —  then 
some  sort  of  plunge  would  have  become  his  immediate 
duty.  His  present  position,  clearly,  was  that  of  seeing 
her  in  the  centre  of  her  sheet  of  dark  water,  and  of 
wondering  if  her  actual  mute  gaze  at  him  did  n't  per 
haps  mean  that  her  planks  were  now  parting.  He  held 
himself  so  ready  that  it  was  quite  as  if  the  inward 
man  had  pulled  off  coat  and  waistcoat.  Before  he 
had  plunged,  however  —  that  is  before  he  had  uttered 
a  question  —  he  saw,  not  without  relief,  that  she  was 
making  for  land.  He  watched  her  steadily  paddle, 
always  a  little  nearer,  and  at  last  he  felt  her  boat  bump. 
The  bump  was  distinct,  and  in  fact  she  stepped 
ashore.  "We  were  all  wrong.  There's  nothing." 

"  Nothing  —  ? "  It  was  like  giving  her  his  hand  up 
the  bank. 

"Between  Charlotte  Verver  and  the  Prince.  I  was 
uneasy  —  but  I  'm  satisfied  now.  I  was  in  fact  quite 
mistaken.  There's  nothing." 

"But  I  thought,"  said  Bob  Assingham,  "that  that 
was  just  what  you  did  persistently  asseverate.  You  've 
guaranteed  their  straightness  from  the  first." 

366 


"  No  —  I  Ve  never  till  now  guaranteed  anything  but 
my  own  disposition  to  worry.  I  've  never  till  now," 
Fanny  went  on  gravely  from  her  chair,  "had  such  a 
chance  to  see  and  to  judge.  I  had  it  at  that  place  — 
if  I  had,  in  my  infatuation  and  my  folly,"  she  added 
with  expression,  "nothing  else.  So  I  did  see  —  I  have 
seen.  And  now  I  know."  Her  emphasis,  as  she  re 
peated  the  word,  made  her  head,  in  her  seat  of  in 
fallibility,  rise  higher.  "I  know." 

The  Colonel  took  it  —  but  took  it  at  first  in  silence. 
"  Do  you  mean  they  've  told  you  —  ? " 

"No  —  I  mean  nothing  so  absurd.  For  in  the  first 
place  I  have  n't  asked  them,  and  in  the  second  their 
word  in  such  a  matter  would  n't  count." 

"Oh,"  said  the  Colonel  with  all  his  oddity,  "they'd 
tell  us." 

It  made  her  face  him  an  instant  as  with  her  old 
impatience  of  his  short  cuts,  always  across  her  finest 
flower-beds;  but  she  felt  none  the  less  that  she  kept 
her  irony  down.  "  Then  when  they  've  told  you,  you  '11 
be  perhaps  so  good  as  to  let  me  know." 

He  jerked  up  his  chin,  testing  the  growth  of  his 
beard  with  the  back  of  his  hand  while  he  fixed  her  with 
a  single  eye.  "Ah  I  don't  say  that  they'd  necessarily 
tell  me  that  they  are  over  the  traces." 

"They'll  necessarily,  whatever  happens,  hold  their 
tongues,  I  hope,  and  I  'm  talking  of  them  now  as 
I  take  them  for  myself  only.  That 's  enough  for  me  — 
it's  all  I  have  to  regard."  With  which,  after  an  in 
stant,  "They're  wonderful,"  said  Fanny  Assingham. 

"Indeed,"  her  husband  concurred,  "I  really  think 
they  are." 

367 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"You'd  think  it  still  more  if  you  knew.  But  you 
don't  know  —  because  you  don't  see.  Their  situa 
tion  "  —  this  was  what  he  did  n't  see  —  "  is  too  extra 
ordinary." 

" 'Too '  —  ? "    He  was  willing  to  try. 

"Too  extraordinary  to  be  believed,  I  mean,  if  one 
did  n't  see.  But  just  that,  in  a  way,  is  what  saves 
them.  They  take  it  seriously." 

He  followed  at  his  own  pace.    "Their  situation?" 

"  The  incredible  side  of  it.  They  make  it  credible." 

"  Credible  then  —  you  do  say  —  to  you  ?  " 

She  looked  at  him  again  for  an  interval.  "They 
believe  in  it  themselves.  They  take  it  for  what  it  is. 
And  that,"  she  said,  "saves  them." 

"But  if  what  it  'is'  is  just  their  chance  —  ?" 

"It's  their  chance  for  what  I  told  you  when  Char 
lotte  first  turned  up.  It's  their  chance  for  the  idea 
that  I  was  then  sure  she  had." 

The  Colonel  showed  his  effort  to  recall.  "Oh 
your  idea,  at  different  moments,  of  any  one  of  their 
ideas!"  This  dim  procession,  visibly,  mustered  be 
fore  him,  and,  with  the  best  will  in  the  world,  he  could 
but  watch  its  immensity.  "Are  you  speaking  now 
of  something  to  which  you  can  comfortably  settle 
down?" 

Again  for  a  little  she  only  glowered  at  him.  "  I  've 
come  back  to  my  belief,  and  that  I  have  done  so  — " 

"Well?"  he  asked  as  she  paused. 

"Well,  shows  I'm  right  —  for  I  assure  you  I  had 
wandered  far.  Now  I  'm  at  home  again,  and  I  mean," 
said  Fanny  Assingham,  "to  stay  here.  They're 
beautiful,"  she  declared. 

368 


THE   PRINCE 

"The  Prince  and  Charlotte?" 

"The  Prince  and  Charlotte.  That's  how  they're 
so  remarkable.  And  the  beauty,"  she  explained,  "is 
that  they're  afraid  for  them.  Afraid  I  mean  for  the 
others." 

"For  Mr.  Verver  and  Maggie  ?"  It  did  take  some 
following.  "  Afraid  of  what  ? " 

"Afraid  of  themselves." 

The  Colonel  wondered.  "Of  ' themselves '  ?  Of 
Mr.  Verver's  and  Maggie's  selves  ? " 

Mrs.  Assingham  remained  patient  as  well  as  lucid. 
"  Yes  —  of  such  blindness  too.  But  most  of  all  of  their 
own  danger." 

He  turned  it  over.  "That  danger  being  the  blind 
ness  —  ? " 

"That  danger  being  their  position.  What  their 
position  contains  —  of  all  the  elements  —  I  need  n't 
at  this  time  of  day  attempt  to  tell  you.  It  contains, 
luckily  —  for  that 's  the  mercy  —  everything  but 
blindness:  I  mean  on  their  part.  The  blindness," 
said  Fanny,  "is  primarily  her  husband's." 

He  stood  for  a  moment;  he  would  have  it  straight. 
"Whose  husband's?" 

"Mr.  Verver's,"  she  went  on.  "The  blindness  is 
most  of  all  his.  That  they  feel  —  that  they  see.  But 
it's  also  his  wife's." 

"Whose  wife's?"  he  asked  as  she  continued  to 
gloom  at  him  in  a  manner  at  variance  with  the  com 
parative  cheer  of  her  contention.  And  then  as  she 
only  gloomed:  "The  Prince's?" 

"  Maggie's  own  —  Maggie's  very  own,"  she  pur 
sued  as  for  herself. 

369 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

He  had  a  pause.  "  Do  you  think  Maggie  so  blind  ? " 

"The  question  is  n't  of  what  I  think.  The  ques 
tion's  of  the  conviction  that  guides  the  Prince  and 
Charlotte — who  have  better  opportunities  than  1  for 
judging." 

The  Colonel  again  wondered.  "Are  you  so  very 
sure  their  opportunities  are  better  ? " 

"Well,"  his  wife  asked,  "what  is  their  whole  so 
extraordinary  situation,  their  extraordinary  relation, 
but  an  opportunity  ? " 

"Ah  my  dear,  you  have  that  opportunity  —  of  their 
extraordinary  situation  and  relation  —  as  much  as 
they." 

"With  the  difference,  darling,"  she  returned  with 
some  spirit,  "that  neither  of  those  matters  are,  if  you 
please,  mine.  I  see  the  boat  they  're  in,  but  I  'm  not, 
thank  God,  in  it  myself.  To-day,  however,"  Mrs. 
Assingham  added,  "to-day  in  Eaton  Square  I  did 
see." 

"Well  then  what?" 

But  she  mused  over  it  still.  "Oh  many  things. 
More  somehow  than  ever  before.  It  was  as  if,  God 
help  me,  I  was  seeing  for  them  —  I  mean  for  the 
others.  It  was  as  if  something  had  happened  —  I 
don't  know  what,  except  some  effect  of  these  days 
with  them  at  that  place  —  that  had  either  made 
things  come  out  or  had  cleared  my  own  eyes."  These 
eyes  indeed  of  the  poor  lady's  rested  on  her  compan 
ion's  meanwhile  with  the  lustre  not  so  much  of  in- 
tenser  insight  as  of  a  particular  portent  that  he  had 
at  various  other  times  had  occasion  to  recognise.  She 
desired  obviously  to  reassure  him,  but  it  apparently 

37° 


THE   PRINCE 

took  a  couple  of  large  candid  gathering  glittering 
tears  to  emphasise  the  fact.  They  had  immediately 
for  him  their  usual  direct  action:  she  must  reassure 
him,  he  was  made  to  feel,  absolutely  in  her  own  way. 
He  'd  adopt  it  and  conform  to  it  as  soon  as  he  should 
be  able  to  make  it  out.  The  only  thing  was  that  it 
took  such  incalculable  twists  and  turns.  The  twist 
seemed  remarkable  for  instance  as  she  developed  her 
indication  of  what  had  come  out  in  the  afternoon. 
"It  was  as  if  I  knew  better  than  ever  what  makes 
them—" 

"What  makes  them?"  —  he  pressed  her  as  she 
fitfully  dropped. 

"Well,  makes  the  Prince  and  Charlotte  take  it  all 
as  they  do.  It  might  well  have  been  difficult  to  know 
how  to  take  it;  and  they  may  even  say  for  themselves 
that  they  were  a  long  time  trying  to  see.  As  I  say, 
to-day,"  she  went  on,  "it  was  as  if  I  were  suddenly, 
with  a  kind  of  horrible  push,  seeing  through  their 
eyes."  On  which,  as  to  shake  off  her  perversity,  Fanny 
Assingham  sprang  up.  But  she  remained  there  under 
the  dim  illumination,  and  while  the  Colonel,  with  his 
high  dry  spare  look  of  "type,"  to  which  a  certain  con 
formity  to  the  whiteness  of  inaccessible  snows  in  his 
necktie,  shirt-front  and  waistcoat  gave  a  rigour  of 
accent,  waited,  watching  her,  they  might,  at  the  late 
hour  and  in  the  still  house,  have  been  a  pair  of  spe 
cious  worldly  adventurers  driven  for  relief  under  sud 
den  stress  to  some  grim  midnight  reckoning  in  an  odd 
corner.  Her  attention  moved  mechanically  over  the 
objects  of  ornament  disposed  too  freely  on  the  walls 
of  staircase  and  landing,  as  to  which  recognition,  for 

371 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

the  time,  had  lost  both  fondness  and  compunction. 
"I  can  imagine  the  way  it  works,"  she  said;  "it's  so 
easy  to  understand.  Yet  I  don't  want  to  be  wrong," 
she  the  next  moment  broke  out  —  "I  don't,  I  don't 
want  to  be  wrong ! " 

"To  make  a  mistake,  you  mean  ?" 

Oh  no,  she  meant  nothing  of  the  sort;  she  knew  but 
too  well  what  she  meant.  "I  don't  make  mistakes. 
But  I  perpetrate  —  in  thought  —  crimes."  And  she 
spoke  with  all  intensity.  "  I  'm  a  most  dreadful  per 
son.  There  are  times  when  I  seem  not  to  mind  a  bit 
what  I  Ve  done,  or  what  I  think  or  imagine  or  fear 
or  accept ;  when  I  feel  that  I  'd  do  it  again  —  feel 
that  I  'd  do  things  myself. " 

"Ah  my  dear!"  the  Colonel  remarked  in  the  cool 
ness  of  debate. 

"Yes,  if  you  had  driven  me  back  on  my  'nature.' 
Luckily  for  you  you  never  have.  You  've  done  every 
thing  else,  but  you  've  never  done  that.  But  what  I 
really  don't  a  bit  want,"  she  declared,  "is  to  abet 
them  or  to  protect  them." 

Her  companion  turned  this  over.  "What  is  there 
to  protect  them  from  ?  —  if,  by  your  now  so  settled 
faith,  they've  done  nothing  that  justly  exposes  them." 

And  it  in  fact  half-pulled  her  up.  "Well,  from  a 
sudden  scare.  From  the  alarm,  I  mean,  of  what 
Maggie  may  think." 

"Yet  if  your  whole  idea  is  that  Maggie  thinks 
nothing  —  ? " 

She  waited  again.  "It  isn't  my  'whole'  idea. 
Nothing 's  my  *  whole '  idea  —  for  I  felt  to-day,  as  I 
tell  you,  that  there 's  so  much  in  the  air." 

3/2 


THE   PRINCE 

"Oh  in  the  air  — !"  the  Colonel  dryly  breathed. 

"Well,  what's  in  the  air  always  has  —  hasn't  it? 
• —  to  come  down  to  the  earth.  And  Maggie,"  Mrs. 
Assingham  continued,  "is  a  very  curious  little  person. 
Since  I  was  'in,'  this  afternoon,  for  seeing  more  than 
I  had  ever  done  —  well,  I  felt  that  too,  for  some  reason, 
as  I  had  n't  yet  felt  it." 

"For  'some'  reason?  For  what  reason?"  And 
then  as  his  wife  at  first  said  nothing:  "Did  she  give 
any  sign  ?  Was  she  in  any  way  different  ? " 

"  She 's  always  so  different  from  any  one  else  in  the 
world  that  it's  hard  to  say  when  she's  different  from 
herself.  But  she  has  made  me,"  said  Fanny  after  an 
instant,  "think  of  her  differently.  She  drove  me 
home." 

"Home  here?" 

"  First  to  Portland  Place  —  on  her  leaving  her 
father :  since  she  does  once  in  a  while  leave  him.  That 
was  to  keep  me  with  her  a  little  longer.  But  she  kept 
the  carriage  and,  after  tea  there,  came  with  me  herself 
back  here.  This  was  also  for  the  same  purpose.  Then 
she  went  home,  though  I  had  brought  her  a  message 
from  the  Prince  that  arranged  their  movements  other 
wise.  He  and  Charlotte  must  have  arrived  —  if  they 
have  arrived  —  expecting  to  drive  together  to  Eaton 
Square  and  keep  Maggie  on  to  dinner  there.  She  has 
everything  there,  you  know  —  she  has  clothes." 

The  Colonel  did  n't  in  fact  know,  but  he  gave  it  his 
apprehension.  "Oh  you  mean  a  change?" 

"Twenty  changes  if  you  like  —  all  sorts  of  things. 
She  dresses  really,  Maggie  does,  as  much  for  her 
father  —  and  she  always  did  —  as  for  her  husband 

373 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

or  for  herself.  She  has  her  room  in  his  house  very 
much  as  she  had  it  before  she  was  married  —  and 
just  as  the  boy  has  quite  a  second  nursery  there,  in 
which  Mrs.  Noble,  when  she  comes  with  him,  makes 
herself,  I  assure  you,  at  home.  Si  bien  that  if  Char 
lotte,  in  her  own  house,  so  to  speak,  should  wish  a 
friend  or  two  to  stay  with  her,  she  really  would  be 
scarce  able  to  put  them  up." 

It  was  a  picture  into  which,  as  a  thrifty  entertainer 
himself,  Bob  Assingham  could  more  or  less  enter. 
"  Maggie  and  the  child  spread  so  ? " 

"Maggie  and  the  child  spread  so." 

Well,  he  considered.    "It  is  rather  rum." 

"That's  all  I  claim"  —  she  seemed  thankful  for 
the  word.  "I  don't  say  it's  anything  more  —  but  it 
is  distinctly  'rum.'" 

Which  after  an  instant  the  Colonel  took  up. 
"'More'  ?  What  more  could  it  be  ?" 

"It  could  be  that  she's  unhappy  and  that  she  takes 
her  funny  little  way  of  consoling  herself.  For  if  she 
were  unhappy"  —  Mrs.  Assingham  had  figured  it  out 
—  "  that 's  just  the  way  I  'm  convinced  she  would  take. 
But  how  can  she  be  unhappy,  since  —  as  I  'm  also 
convinced  —  she  in  the  midst  of  everything  adores  her 
husband  as  much  as  ever  ? " 

The  Colonel  at  this  brooded  for  a  little  at  large. 
"Then  if  she's  so  happy  please  what's  the  matter  ?" 

It  made  his  wife  almost  spring  at  him.  "You  think 
then  she 's  secretly  wretched  ? " 

But  he  threw  up  his  arms  in  deprecation.  "Ah 
my  dear,  I  give  them  up  to  you.  I  've  nothing  more  to 
suggest." 

374 


"Then  it's  not  sweet  of  you."  She  spoke  at  pre 
sent  as  if  he  were  frequently  sweet.  "  You  admit  that 
it  iV'rum.'" 

And  this  indeed  fixed  again  for  a  moment  his  in 
tention.  "  Has  Charlotte  complained  of  the  want  of 
rooms  for  her  friends  ?" 

"Never,  that  I  know  of,  a  word.  It  is  n't  the  sort 
of  thing  she  does.  And  whom  has  she  after  all,"  Mrs. 
Assingham  added,  "to  complain  to?" 

"  Has  n't  she  always  you  ? " 

"Oh  'me'!  Charlotte  and  I,  nowadays — !"  She 
spoke  as  of  a  chapter  closed.  "Yet  see  the  justice  I 
still  do  her.  She  strikes  me  more  and  more  as  ex 
traordinary." 

A  deeper  shade,  at  the  re-echo  of  the  word,  had 
come  into  the  Colonel's  face.  "If  they're  each  and 
all  so  extraordinary  then,  is  n't  that  why  one  must 
just  resign  one's  self  to  wash  one's  hands  of  them  — 
to  be  lost  ? "  Her  face  however  so  met  the  question 
as  if  it  were  but  a  flicker  of  the  old  tone  that  their 
trouble  had  now  become  too  real  for  —  her  charged 
eyes  so  betrayed  the  condition  of  her  nerves  that  he 
stepped  back  alertly  enough  to  firmer  ground.  He  had 
spoken  before  in  this  light  of  a  plain  man's  vision, 
but  he  must  be  something  more  than  a  plain  man 
now.  "  Has  n't  she  then,  Charlotte,  always  her  hus 
band  —  ?" 

"To  complain  to?   She'd  rather  die." 

"Oh  ! "  —  and  Bob  Assingham's  face,  at  the  vision 
of  such  extremities,  lengthened  for  very  docility. 
"Has  n't  she  the  Prince  then?" 

"For  such  matters  ?   Oh  he  does  n't  count." 
375 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"  I  thought  that  was  just  what  —  as  the  basis  of  our 
agitation  —  he  does  do ! " 

Mrs.  Assingham,  however,  had  her  distinction 
ready.  "Not  a  bit  as  a  person  to  bore  with  com 
plaints.  The  ground  of  my  agitation  is  exactly  that 
she  never  on  any  pretext  bores  him.  Not  Charlotte !" 
And  in  the  imagination  of  Mrs.  Verver's  superiority 
to  any  such  mistake  she  gave,  characteristically, 
something  like  a  toss  of  her  head  —  as  marked  a 
tribute  to  that  lady's  general  grace,  in  all  the  condi 
tions,  as  the  personage  referred  to  doubtless  had  ever 
received. 

"Ah  only  Maggie!"  With  which  the  Colonel  gave 
a  short  low  gurgle.  But  it  found  his  wife  again  pre 
pared. 

"No  —  not  only  Maggie.  A  great  many  people  in 
London  —  and  small  wonder !  —  bore  him." 

"Maggie  only  worst  then  ?"  But  it  was  a  question 
that  he  had  promptly  dropped  at  the  returning  brush 
of  another,  of  which  she  had  shortly  before  sown  the 
seed.  "You  said  just  now  that  he  would  by  this  time 
be  back  with  Charlotte  'if  they  have  arrived.'  You 
think  it  then  possible  that  they  really  won't  have 
returned  ?" 

His  companion  exhibited  to  view,  for  the  idea,  a 
sense  of  her  responsibility;  but  this  was  insufficient, 
clearly,  to  keep  her  from  entertaining  it.  "I  think 
there 's  nothing  they  're  not  now  capable  of —  in  their 
so  intense  good  faith." 

"  Good  faith  ? "  —  he  echoed  the  words,  which  had 
in  fact  something  of  an  odd  ring,  critically. 

"Their  false  position.   It  comes  to  the  same  thing." 
376 


THE  PRINCE 

And  she  bore  down  with  her  decision  the  superficial 
lack  of  sequence.  "They  may  very  possibly,  for  a 
demonstration  —  as  I  see  them  —  not  have  come 
back." 

He  could  but  wonder,  at  this,  how  she  did  see  them. 
"  May  have  bolted  somewhere  together  ? " 

"May  have  stayed  over  at  Matcham  itself  till  to 
morrow.  May  have  wired  home,  each  of  them,  since 
Maggie  left  me.  May  have  done,"  Fanny  Assingham 
continued,  "God  knows  what!"  She  went  on  sud 
denly  with  more  emotion  —  which,  at  the  pressure 
of  some  spring  of  her  inner  vision,  broke  out  in  a 
wail  of  distress  imperfectly  smothered.  "Whatever 
they've  done  I  shall  never  know.  Never,  never  — 
because  I  don't  want  to  and  because  nothing  will 
induce  me.  So  they  may  do  as  they  like.  But  I've 
worked  for  them  all!  "  She  uttered  this  last  with 
another  irrepressible  quaver,  and  the  next  moment  her 
tears  had  come,  though  she  had,  with  the  explosion, 
quitted  her  husband  as  if  to  hide  it  from  him.  She 
passed  into  the  dusky  drawing-room  where  during 
his  own  prowl  shortly  previous  he  had  drawn  up  a 
blind,  so  that  the  light  of  the  street-lamps  came  in 
a  little  at  the  window.  She  made  for  this  window, 
against  which  she  leaned  her  head,  while  the  Colonel, 
with  his  lengthened  face,  looked  after  her  for  a  min 
ute  and  hesitated.  He  might  have  been  trying  to 
guess  what  she  had  really  done,  to  what  extent,  be 
yond  his  knowledge  or  his  conception,  in  the  affairs 
of  these  people,  she  could  have  committed  herself. 
But  to  hear  her  cry  and  yet  do  her  best  not  to  was 
quickly  enough  too  much  for  him ;  he  had  known  her 

377 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

at  other  times  quite  not  make  the  repressive  effort, 
and  that  had  n't  been  so  bad.  He  went  to  her  and 
put  his  arm  round  her;  he  drew  her  head  to  his  breast, 
where,  while  she  gasped,  she  let  it  stay  a  little  —  all 
with  a  patience  that  presently  stilled  her.  Yet  the 
effect  of  this  small  crisis,  oddly  enough,  was  not  to 
close  their  colloquy,  with  the  natural  result  of  sending 
them  to  bed :  what  was  between  them  had  opened  out 
further,  had  somehow,  through  the  sharp  show  of  her 
feeling,  taken  a  positive  stride,  had  entered,  as  it  were, 
without  more  words,  the  region  of  the  understood, 
shutting  the  door  after  it  and  bringing  them  so  still 
more  nearly  face  to  face.  They  remained  for  some 
minutes  looking  at  it  through  the  dim  window  which 
opened  upon  the  world  of  human  trouble  in  general 
and  which  let  the  vague  light  play  here  and  there  upon 
gilt  and  crystal  and  colour,  the  florid  features,  loom 
ing  dimly,  of  Fanny's  drawing-room.  And  the  beauty 
of  what  thus  passed  between  them,  passed  with  her 
cry  of  pain,  with  her  burst  of  tears,  with  his  wonder 
ment  and  his  kindness  and  his  comfort,  with  the  mo 
ments  of  their  silence,  above  all,  which  might  have 
represented  their  sinking  together,  hand  in  hand  for  a 
time,  into  the  mystic  lake  where  he  had  begun,  as  we 
have  hinted,  by  seeing  her  paddle  alone  —  the  beauty 
of  it  was  that  they  now  could  really  talk  better  than 
before,  because  the  basis  had  at  last  once  for  all  de 
fined  itself.  What  was  the  basis,  which  Fanny  abso 
lutely  exacted,  but  that  Charlotte  and  the  Prince 
must  be  saved  —  so  far  as  consistently  speaking  of 
them  as  still  safe  might  save  them  ?  It  did  save  them 
somehow  for  Fanny's  troubled  mind  —  for  that  was 

378 


the  nature  of  the  mind  of  women.  He  conveyed  to  her 
now,  at  all  events,  by  refusing  her  no  gentleness,  that 
he  had  sufficiently  got  the  tip  and  that  the  tip  was 
all  he  had  wanted.  This  remained  quite  clear  even 
when  he  presently  reverted  to  what  she  had  told  him 
of  her  recent  passage  with  Maggie.  "I  don't  alto 
gether  see,  you  know,  what  you  infer  from  it,  or  why 
you  infer  anything."  When  he  so  expressed  himself 
it  was  quite  as  if  in  possession  of  what  they  had 
brought  up  from  the  depths. 


XI 


"I  CAN'T  say  more,"  this  made  his  companion  re 
ply,  "than  that  something  in  her  face,  her  voice  and 
her  whole  manner  acted  upon  me  as  nothing  in  her  had 
ever  acted  before;  and  just  for  the  reason,  above  all, 
that  I  felt  her  trying  her  very  best  —  and  her  very 
best,  poor  duck,  is  very  good  —  to  be  quiet  and  nat 
ural.  It's  when  one  sees  people  who  always  are 
natural  making  little  pale  pathetic  blinking  efforts 
for  it  —  then  it  is  that  one  knows  something's  the 
matter.  I  can't  describe  my  impression  —  you  'd 
have  had  it  for  yourself.  And  the  only  thing  that  ever 
can  be  the  matter  with  Maggie  is  that.  By  'that'  I 
mean  her  beginning  to  doubt.  To  doubt,  for  the  first 
time,"  Mrs.  Assingham  wound  up,  "  of  her  wonderful 
little  judgement  of  her  wonderful  little  world." 

It  was  impressive,  Fanny's  vision,  and  the  Colonel, 
as  if  himself  agitated  by  it,  took  another  turn  of  prowl 
ing.  "To  doubt  of  fidelity  —  to  doubt  of  friendship ! 
Poor  duck  indeed!  It  will  go  hard  with  her.  But 
she'll  put  it  all,"  he  concluded,  "on  Charlotte." 

Mrs.  Assingham,  still  darkly  contemplative,  denied 
this  with  a  headshake.  "She  won't  'put'  it  anywhere. 
She  won't  do  with  it  anything  any  one  else  would. 
She '11  take  it  all  herself." 

"You  mean  she'll  make  it  out  her  own  fault?" 

"  Yes  —  she  '11  find  means  somehow  to  arrive  at 
that." 

380 


THE  PRINCE 

"Ah  then,"  the  Colonel  dutifully  declared,  "she's 
indeed  a  little  brick!" 

"Oh,"  his  wife  returned,  "you'll  see  in  one  way 
or  another  to  what  tune ! "  And  she  spoke,  of  a  sud 
den,  with  an  approach  to  elation  —  so  that,  as  if 
immediately  feeling  his  surprise,  she  turned  round  to 
him.  "She'll  see  me  somehow  through!" 

"Seeyow  — ?" 

"  Yes,  me.  I  'm  the  worst.  For,"  said  Fanny  As- 
singham,  now  with  a  harder  exaltation,  "I  did  it  all. 
I  recognise  that  —  I  accept  it.  She  won't  cast  it  up  at 
me  —  she  won't  cast  up  anything.  So  I  throw  myself 
upon  her  —  she'll  bear  me  up."  She  spoke  almost 
volubly  —  she  held  him  with  her  sudden  sharpness. 
"She'll  carry  the  whole  weight  of  us." 

There  was  still  nevertheless  wonder  in  it.  "You 
mean  she  won't  mind  ?  I  say,  love  — ! "  And  he 
not  unkindly  stared.  "Then  where 's  the  difficulty  ?" 

"There  is  n't  any ! "  Fanny  declared  with  the  same 
rich  emphasis. 

It  kept  him  indeed,  as  by  the  loss  of  the  thread, 
looking  at  her  longer.  "Ah  you  mean  there  is  n't  any 
for  us!" 

She  met  his  look  for  a  minute  as  if  it  perhaps  a  lit 
tle  too  much  imputed  a  selfishness,  a  concern  for 
their  own  surface  at  any  cost.  Then  she  might  have 
been  deciding  that  their  own  surface  was  after  all 
what  they  had  most  to  consider.  "Not,"  she  said  with 
dignity,  "if  we  properly  keep  our  heads."  She  ap 
peared  even  to  signify  that  they  would  begin  by  keep 
ing  them  now.  This  was  what  it  was  to  have  at  last 
a  constituted  basis.  "Do  you  remember  what  you 

381 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

said  to  me  that  night  of  my  first  real  anxiety  —  after 
the  Foreign  Office  party  ? " 

"  In  the  carriage  —  as  we  came  home  ? "  Yes  —  he 
could  recall  it.  "  Leave  them  to  pull  through  ? " 

"Precisely.  'Trust  their  own  wit,'  you  practically 
said,  'to  save  all  appearances.'  Well,  I've  trusted  it. 
I  have  left  them  to  pull  through." 

He  considered.  "And  your  point  is  that  they  're  not 
doing  so  ? " 

"  I  've  left  them,"  she  went  on,  "  but  now  I  see  how 
and  where.  I  've  been  leaving  them  all  the  while,  with 
out  knowing  it,  to  her." 

"To  the  Princess?" 

"And  that's  what  I  mean,"  Mrs.  Assingham 
pensively  pursued.  "That's  what  happened  to  me 
with  her  to-day,"  she  continued  to  explain.  "It 
came  home  to  me  that  that 's  what  I  've  really  been 
doing." 

"Oh  I  see." 

"  I  need  n't  torment  myself.  She  has  taken  them 
over." 

The  Colonel  declared  that  he  "saw";  yet  it  was 
as  if,  at  this,  he  a  little  sightlessly  stared.  "But  what 
then  has  happened,  from  one  day  to  the  other,  to  her? 
What  has  opened  her  eyes  ? " 

"They  were  never  really  shut.   She  misses  him." 

"  Then  why  has  n't  she  missed  him  before  ? " 

Well,  facing  him  there,  among  their  domestic 
glooms  and  glints,  Fanny  worked  it  out.  "She  did  — • 
but  she  would  n't  let  herself  know  it.  She  had  her 
reason  —  she  wore  her  blind.  Now  at  last  her  situa 
tion  has  come  to  a  head.  To-day  she  does  know  it. 


THE   PRINCE 

And  that's  illuminating.  It  has  been,"  Mrs.  Assing- 
ham  wound  up,  "illuminating  to  me." 

Her  husband  attended,  but  the  momentary  effect  of 
his  attention  was  vagueness  again,  and  the  refuge 
of  his  vagueness  was  a  gasp.  "  Poor  dear  little  girl ! " 

"Ah  no  —  don't  pity  her!" 

This  nevertheless  pulled  him  up.  "We  mayn't  even 
be  sorry  for  her  ? " 

"  Not  now  —  or  at  least  not  yet.  It 's  too  soon  — 
that  is  if  it  is  n't  very  much  too  late.  This  will  de 
pend,"  Mrs.  Assingham  went  on;  "at  any  rate  we 
shall  see.  We  might  have  pitied  her  before  —  for  all 
the  good  it  would  then  have  done  her;  we  might  have 
begun  some  time  ago.  Now  however  she  has  begun  to 
live.  And  the  way  it  comes  to  me,  the  way  it  comes 
to  me — "  But  again  she  projected  her  vision. 

"The  way  it  comes  to  you  can  scarcely  be  that  she  '11 
like  it!" 

"  The  way  it  comes  to  me  is  that  she  will  live.  The 
way  it  comes  to  me  is  that  she'll  triumph." 

She  said  this  with  so  sudden  a  prophetic  flare  that 
it  fairly  cheered  her  husband.  "  Ah  then  we  must  back 
her!" 

"No  —  we  must  n't  touch  her.  We  may  n't  touch 
any  of  them.  We  must  keep  our  hands  off;  we  must 
go  on  tiptoe.  We  must  simply  watch  and  wait.  And 
meanwhile,"  said  Mrs.  Assingham,  "we  must  bear  it 
as  we  can.  That 's  where  we  are  —  and  it  serves  us 
right.  We're  in  presence." 

And  so,  moving  about  the  room  as  in  communion 
with  shadowy  portents,  she  left  it  till  he  questioned 
again.  "  In  presence  of  what  ? " 

383 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"Well,  of  something  possibly  beautiful.  Beautiful 
as  it  may  come  off." 

She  had  paused  there  before  him  while  he  won 
dered.  "You  mean  she'll  get  the  Prince  back?" 

She  raised  her  hand  in  quick  impatience:  the  sug 
gestion  might  have  been  almost  abject.  "  It  is  n't  a 
question  of  recovery.  It  won't  be  a  question  of  any 
vulgar  struggle.  To  'get  him  back'  she  must  have 
lost  him,  and  to  have  lost  him  she  must  have  had  him." 
With  which  Fanny  shook  her  head.  "What  I  take 
her  to  be  waking  up  to  is  the  truth  that  all  the  while 
she  really  has  n't  had  him.  Never." 

"Ah  my  dear  — !"  the  poor  Colonel  panted. 

"Never!"  his  wife  inexorably  repeated.  And  she 
went  on  without  pity.  "  Do  you  remember  what  I  said 
to  you  long  ago  —  that  evening,  just  before  their 
marriage,  when  Charlotte  had  so  suddenly  turned 
up?" 

The  smile  with  which  he  met  this  appeal  was  n't,  it 
was  to  be  feared,  robust.  "What  have  n't  you,  love, 
said  in  your  time  ? " 

"So  many  things,  no  doubt,  that  they  make  a 
chance  for  my  having  once  or  twice  spoken  the  truth. 
I  never  spoke  it  more,  at  all  events,  than  when  I  de 
clared,  on  that  occasion,  that  Maggie  was  the  creature 
in  the  world  to  whom  a  wrong  thing  could  least  be 
communicated.  It  was  as  if  her  imagination  had  been 
closed  to  it,  her  sense  altogether  sealed.  That  there 
fore,"  Fanny  continued,  "is  what  will  now  have  to 
happen.  Her  sense  will  have  to  open." 

"I  see."  He  nodded.  "To  the  wrong."  He  nodded 
again  almost  cheerfully  —  as  if  he  had  been  keeping 

384 


THE   PRINCE 

the  peace  with  a  baby  or  a  lunatic.  "To  the  very, 
very  wrong." 

But  his  wife's  spirit,  after  its  effort  of  wing,  was 
able  to  remain  higher.  "To  what's  called  Evil  — 
with  a  very  big  E  :  for  the  first  time  in  her  life.  To  the 
discovery  of  it,  to  the  knowledge  of  it,  to  the  crude  ex 
perience  of  it."  And  she  gave,  for  the  possibility,  the 
largest  measure.  "To  the  harsh  bewildering  brush, 
the  daily  chilling  breath  of  it.  Unless  indeed  "  —  and 
here  Mrs.  Assingham  noted  a  limit  —  "unless  indeed, 
as  yet  (so  far  as  she  has  come,  and  if  she  comes  no  fur 
ther),  simply  to  the  suspicion  and  the  dread.  What 
we  shall  see  is  whether  that  mere  dose  of  alarm  will 
prove  enough." 

He  considered.  "  But  enough  for  what  then,  dear  — 
if  not  enough  to  break  her  heart  ? " 

"Enough  to  give  her  a  shaking!"  Mrs.  Assingham 
rather  oddly  replied.  "To  give  her,  I  mean,  the  right 
one.  The  right  one  won't  break  her  heart.  It  will 
make  her,"  she  explained  —  "well,  it  will  make  her, 
by  way  of  a  change,  understand  one  or  two  things  in 
the  world." 

"  But  is  n't  it  a  pity,"  the  Colonel  asked,  "that  they 
should  happen  to  be  the  one  or  two  that  will  be  the 
most  disagreeable  to  her  ? " 

"Oh  'disagreeable' — ?  They'll  have  bad  to  be 
disagreeable  —  to  show  her  a  little  where  she  is. 
They'll  have  had  to  be  disagreeable  to  make  her  sit 
up.  They  '11  have  had  to  be  disagreeable  to  make  her 
decide  to  live." 

Bob  Assingham  was  now  at  the  window,  while  his 
companion  slowly  revolved ;  he  had  lighted  a  cigarette, 

385 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

for  final  patience,  and  he  seemed  vaguely  to  "  time  " 
her  as  she  moved  to  and  fro.  He  had  at  the  same  time 
to  do  justice  to  the  lucidity  she  had  at  last  attained, 
and  it  was  doubtless  by  way  of  expression  of  this 
teachability  that  he  let  his  eyes  roll,  for  a  minute,  as 
from  the  force  of  feeling,  over  the  upper  dusk  of  the 
room.  He  had  thought  of  the  response  his  wife's 
words  ideally  implied.  "  Decide  to  live  —  ah  yes !  — 
for  her  child." 

"Oh  bother  her  child ! "  —  and  he  had  never  felt  so 
snubbed,  for  an  exemplary  view,  as  when  Fanny  now 
stopped  short.  "To  live,  you  poor  dear,  for  her 
father  —  which  is  another  pair  of  sleeves ! "  And  Mrs. 
Assingham's  whole  ample  ornamented  person  irra 
diated,  with  this,  the  truth  that  had  begun,  under  so 
much  handling,  to  glow.  "Any  idiot  can  do  things  for 
her  child.  She  '11  have  a  motive  more  original,  and  we 
shall  see  how  it  will  work  her.  She'll  have  to  save 
him." 

"To  'save'  him  —  ?" 

"To  keep  her  father  from  her  own  knowledge. 
That "  —  and  she  seemed  to  see  it,  before  her,  in  her 
husband's  very  eyes  —  "will  be  work  cut  out ! "  With 
which,  as  at  the  highest  conceivable  climax,  she  wound 
up  their  colloquy.  "Good-night!" 

There  was  something  in  her  manner,  however  —  or 
in  the  effect  at  least  of  this  supreme  demonstration  — 
that  had  fairly,  and  by  a  single  touch,  lifted  him  to  her 
side;  so  that,  after  she  had  turned  her  back  to  regain 
the  landing  and  the  staircase,  he  overtook  her,  before 
she  had  begun  to  mount,  with  the  ring  of  excited  per 
ception.  "Ah  but,  you  know,  that's  rather  jolly!" 

386 


THE  PRINCE 

"'Jolly'  —  ?"  She  turned  upon  it  again  from  the 
foot  of  the  staircase. 

"I  mean  it's  rather  charming." 

"'Charming'  —  ?"  It  had  still  to  be  their  law,  a 
little,  that  she  was  tragic  when  he  was  comic. 

"  I  mean  it 's  rather  beautiful.  You  just  said  your 
self  it  would  be.  Only,"  he  pursued  promptly,  with 
the  impetus  of  this  idea,  and  as  if  it  had  suddenly 
touched  with  light  for  him  connexions  hitherto  dim  — 
"only  I  don't  quite  see  why  that  very  care  for  him 
which  has  carried  her  to  such  other  lengths,  precisely, 
as  affect  one  as  so  '  rum,'  has  n't  also  by  the  same 
stroke  made  her  notice  a  little  more  what  has  been 
going  on." 

"Ah  there  you  are!  It's  the  question  that  I've  all 
along  been  asking  myself."  She  had  rested  her  eyes 
on  the  carpet,  but  she  raised  them  as  she  pursued  — 
she  let  him  have  it  straight.  "And  it's  the  question  of 
an  idiot." 

"An  idiot  —  ?" 

"  Well,  the  idiot  that  /  've  been  in  all  sorts  of  ways 
—  so  often  of  late  have  I  asked  it.  You  're  excuseable 
since  you  ask  it  but  now.  The  answer  I  saw  to-day 
has  all  the  while  been  staring  me  in  the  face." 

"Then  what  in  the  world  is  it?" 

"Why  the  very  intensity  of  her  conscience  about 
him  —  the  very  passion  of  her  brave  little  piety. 
That's  the  way  it  has  worked,"  Mrs.  Assingham 
explained  —  "and  I  admit  it  to  have  been  as  'rum* 
a  way  as  possible.  But  it  has  been  working  from  a 
'rum'  start.  From  the  moment  the  dear  man  married 
to  ease  his  daughter  off  and  it  then  happened  by  an 

387 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

extraordinary  perversity  that  the  very  opposite  effect 
was  produced  — ! "  With  the  renewed  vision  of  this 
fatality,  however,  she  could  give  but  a  desperate 
shrug. 

"  I  see,"  the  Colonel  sympathetically  mused.  "That 
was  a  rum  start." 

But  his  very  response,  as  she  again  flung  up  her 
arms,  seemed  to  make  her  sense  for  a  moment  in 
tolerable.  "  Yes  —  there  I  am !  I  was  really  at  the 
bottom  of  it,"  she  declared;  "I  don't  know  what 
possessed  me  —  but  I  planned  for  him,  I  goaded  him 
on."  With  which,  however,  the  next  moment,  she 
took  herself  up.  "  Or  rather  I  do  know  what  possessed 
me  —  for  was  n't  he  beset  with  ravening  women, 
right  and  left,  and  did  n't  he  quite  pathetically  appeal 
for  protection,  did  n't  he  quite  charmingly  show  one 
how  he  needed  and  desired  it  ?  Maggie,"  she  thus 
lucidly  continued,  "  could  n't,  with  a  new  life  of  her 
own,  give  herself  up  to  doing  for  him  in  the  future  all 
she  had  done  in  the  past  —  to  fencing  him  in,  to 
keeping  him  safe  and  keeping  them  off.  One  perceived 
this,"  she  went  on  —  "out  of  the  abundance  of  one's 
affection  and  one's  sympathy."  It  all  blessedly  came 
back  to  her  —  when  it  was  n't  all  for  the  fiftieth  time 
obscured,  in  face  of  the  present  facts,  by  anxiety  and 
compunction.  "One  was  no  doubt  a  meddlesome 
fool;  one  always  is,  to  think  one  sees  people's  lives 
for  them  better  than  they  see  them  for  themselves. 
But  one's  excuse  here,"  she  insisted,  "was  that  these 
people  clearly  did  nt  see  them  for  themselves  — 
did  n't  see  them  at  all.  It  struck  one  for  very  pity 
• — that  they  were  making  a  mess  of  such  charming  ma- 

388 


THE   PRINCE 

terial ;  that  they  were  but  wasting  it  and  letting  it  go. 
They  did  n't  know  bow  to  live  —  and  somehow  one 
could  n't,  if  one  took  an  interest  in  them  at  all,  simply 
stand  and  see  it.  That's  what  I  pay  for"  —  and  the 
poor  woman,  in  straighter  communion  with  her  com 
panion's  intelligence  at  this  moment,  she  appeared  to 
feel,  than  she  had  ever  been  before,  let  him  have  the 
whole  of  the  burden  of  her  consciousness.  "  I  always 
pay  for  it,  sooner  or  later,  my  sociable,  my  damnable, 
my  unnecessary  interest.  Nothing  of  course  would 
suit  me  but  that  it  should  fix  itself  also  on  Charlotte  — 
Charlotte  who  was  hovering  there  on  the  edge  of  our 
lives  when  not  beautifully  and  a  trifle  mysteriously 
flitting  across  them,  and  who  was  a  piece  of  waste  and 
a  piece  of  threatened  failure  just  as,  for  any  possible 
good  to  the  world,  Mr.  Verver  and  Maggie  were.  It 
began  to  come  over  me  in  the  watches  of  the  night 
that  Charlotte  was  a  person  who  could  keep  off  raven 
ing  women  —  without  being  one  herself,  either,  in 
the  vulgar  way  of  the  others;  and  that  this  service  to 
Mr.  Verver  would  be  a  sweet  employment  for  her 
future.  There  was  something  of  course  that  might 
have  stopped  me :  you  know,  you  know  what  I  mean 
—  it  looks  at  me,"  she  veritably  moaned,  "out  of 
your  face!  But  all  I  can  say  is  that  it  did  n't;  the 
reason  largely  being  —  once  I  had  fallen  in  love  with 
the  beautiful  symmetry  of  my  plan  —  that  I  seemed 
to  feel  sure  Maggie  would  accept  Charlotte,  whereas 
I  did  n't  quite  make  out  either  what  other  woman,  or 
what  other  kind  of  woman,  one  could  think  of  her 
accepting." 

"  I  see  —  I  see."    She  had  paused,  meeting  all  the 
389 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

while  his  listening  look,  and  the  fever  of  her  retro 
spect  had  so  risen  with  her  talk  that  the  desire  was 
visibly  strong  in  him  to  meet  her,  on  his  side,  but 
with  cooling  breath.  "One  quite  understands,  my 
dear." 

Yet  it  only  kept  her  there  sombre.  "I  naturally 
see,  love,  what  you  understand;  which  sits  again 
perfectly  in  your  eyes.  You  see  that  I  saw  that  Mag 
gie  would  accept  her  in  helpless  ignorance.  Yes,  dear 
est" —  and  the  grimness  of  her  lucidity  suddenly 
once  more  possessed  her:  "you  've  only  to  tell  me  that 
that  knowledge  was  my  reason  for  what  I  did.  How, 
when  you  do,  can  I  stand  up  to  you  ?  You  see,"  she 
said  with  an  ineffable  headshake,  "that  I  don't  stand 
up!  I'm  down,  down,  down,"  she  declared;  "yet"  — 
she  as  quickly  added  —  "there's  just  one  little  thing 
that  helps  to  save  my  life."  And  she  kept  him  waiting 
but  an  instant.  "They  might  easily  —  they  would 
perhaps  even  certainly  —  have  done  something 
worse." 

He  thought.    "Worse  than  that  Charlotte  —  ?" 

"Ah  don't  tell  me,"  she  cried,  "that  there  could 
have  been  nothing  worse.  There  might,  as  they  were, 
have  been  many  things.  Charlotte,  in  her  way,  is 
extraordinary." 

He  was  almost  simultaneous.    "  Extraordinary ! " 

"She  observes  the  forms,"  said  Fanny  Assingham. 

"With  the  Prince  —  ?" 

"For  the  Prince.  And  with  the  others,"  she  went 
on.  "With  Mr.  Verver  —  wonderfully.  But  above 
all  with  Maggie.  And  the  forms  "  —  she  had  to  do 
even  them  justice —  "are  two  thirds  of  conduct.  Say 

39° 


THE   PRINCE 

he  had  married  a  woman  who  would  have  made  a 
hash  of  them." 

But  he  jerked  back.  "Ah  my  dear,  I  would  n't  say 
it  for  the  world ! " 

"Say,"  she  none  the  less  pursued,  "he  had  mar 
ried  a  woman  the  Prince  would  really  have  cared 
for." 

"  You  mean  then  he  does  n't  care  for  Char 
lotte  —  ?" 

This  was  still  a  new  view  to  jump  to,  and  the  Col 
onel,  perceptibly,  wished  to  make  sure  of  the  neces 
sity  of  the  effort.  For  that,  while  he  stared,  his  wife 
allowed  him  time;  at  the  end  of  which  she  simply 
said:  "No!" 

"Then  what  on  earth  are  they  up  to  ?"  Still  how 
ever  she  only  looked  at  him ;  so  that,  standing  there 
before  her  with  his  hands  in  his  pockets,  he  had  time 
to  risk  soothingly  another  question.  "Are  the  'forms* 
you  speak  of  —  that  are  two  thirds  of  conduct  — 
what  will  be  keeping  her  now,  by  your  hypothesis, 
from  coming  home  with  him  till  morning  ? " 

"Yes  —  absolutely.    Their  forms." 

"'Theirs'  —  ?" 

"  Maggie's  and  Mr.  Verver's  —  those  they  impose 
on  Charlotte  and  the  Prince.  Those,"  she  developed, 
"  that  so  perversely,  as  I  say,  have  succeeded  in  setting 
themselves  up  as  the  right  ones." 

He  considered  —  but  only  now  at  last  really  to 
relapse  into  woe.  "Your  'perversity,'  my  dear,  is 
exactly  what  I  don't  understand.  The  state  of  things 
existing  has  n't  grown,  like  a  field  of  mushrooms,  in 
a  night.  Whatever  they,  all  round,  may  be  in  for  now 

391 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

is  at  least  the  consequence  of  what  they  've  done.  Are 
they  mere  helpless  victims  of  fate  ? " 

Well,  Fanny  at  last  had  the  courage  of  it.  "Yes  — 
they  are.  To  be  so  abjectly  innocent  —  that  is  to  be 
victims  of  fate." 

"And  Charlotte  and  the  Prince  are  abjectly  inno 
cent—?" 

It  took  her  another  minute,  but  she  rose  to  the  full 
height.  "Yes.  That  is  they  were  —  as  much  so  in 
their  way  as  the  others.  There  were  beautiful  inten 
tions  all  round.  The  Prince's  and  Charlotte's  were 
beautiful  —  of  that  I  had  my  faith.  They  were  —  I  'd 
go  to  the  stake.  Otherwise,"  she  added,  "I  should 
have  been  a  wretch.  And  I  've  not  been  a  wretch. 
I  've  only  been  a  double-dyed  donkey." 

"Ah  then,"  he  asked,  "what  does  our  muddle  make 
them  to  have  been  ? " 

"Well,  too  much  taken  up  with  considering  each 
other.  You  may  call  such  a  mistake  as  that  by  what 
ever  name  you  please;  it  at  any  rate  means,  all 
round,  their  case.  It  illustrates  the  misfortune," 
said  Mrs.  Assingham  gravely,  "of  being  too,  too 
charming." 

This  was  another  matter  that  took  some  following, 
but  the  Colonel  again  did  his  best.  "Yes,  but  to 
whom  ?  —  does  n't  it  rather  depend  on  that  ?  To 
whom  have  the  Prince  and  Charlotte  then  been  too 
charming  ? " 

"To  each  other  in  the  first  place  —  obviously.  And 
then  both  of  them  together  to  Maggie." 

"To  Maggie?"  he  wonderingly  echoed. 

"To   Maggie."     She  was   now   crystalline.     "By 

392 


THE   PRINCE 

having  accepted,  from  the  first,  so  guilelessly  —  yes, 
so  guilelessly  themselves  —  her  guileless  idea  of  still 
having  her  father,  of  keeping  him  fast,  in  her  life." 

"Then  is  n't  one  supposed,  in  common  humanity, 
and  if  one  has  n't  quarrelled  with  him,  and  one  has  the 
means,  and  he,  on  his  side,  does  n't  drink  or  kick  up 
rows  —  is  n't  one  supposed  to  keep  one's  aged  parent 
in  one's  life  ?" 

"Certainly  —  when  there  are  n't  particular  reasons 
against  it.  That  there  may  be  others  than  his  getting 
drunk  is  exactly  the  moral  of  what 's  before  us.  In  the 
first  place  Mr.  Verver  is  n't  aged." 

The  Colonel  just  hung  fire  —  but  it  came.  "Then 
why  the  deuce  does  he  —  oh  poor  dear  man! — be 
have  as  if  he  were  ? " 

She  took  a  moment  to  meet  it.  "  How  do  you  know 
how  he  behaves  ? " 

"Well,  my  own  love,  we  see  how  Charlotte  does!" 

Again,  at  this,  she  faltered;  but  again  she  rose. 
"Ah  isn't  my  whole  point  that  he's  charming  to 
her?" 

"  Does  n't  it  depend  a  bit  on  what  she  regards  as 
charming  ? " 

She  faced  the  question  as  if  it  were  flippant,  then 
with  a  headshake  of  dignity  she  brushed  it  away. 
"It's  Mr.  Verver  who's  really  young  —  it's  Char 
lotte  who's  really  old.  And  what  I  was  saying,"  she 
added,  "isn't  affected—!" 

"You  were  saying"  —  he  did  her  the  justice  — 
"that  they're  all  guileless." 

"That  they  were.  Guileless  all  at  first  —  quite  ex 
traordinarily.  It 's  what  I  mean  by  their  failure  to  see 

393 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

that  the  more  they  took  for  granted  they  could  work 
together  the  more  they  were  really  working  apart. 
For  I  repeat,"  Fanny  went  on,  "that  I  really  believe 
Charlotte  and  the  Prince  honestly  to  have  made  up 
their  minds,  originally,  that  their  very  esteem  for  Mr. 
Verver  —  which  was  serious,  as  well  it  might  be !  — 
would  save  them." 

"I  see."  The  Colonel  inclined  himself.  "And  save 
him." 

"It  comes  to  the  same  thing!" 

"Then  save  Maggie." 

"That  comes,"  said  Mrs.  Assingham,  "to something 
a  little  different.  For  Maggie  has  done  the  most." 

He  wondered.    "What  do  you  call  the  most?" 

"Well,  she  did  it  originally  —  she  began  the  vicious 
circle.  For  that  —  though  you  make  round  eyes  at 
my  associating  her  with  'vice'  —  is  simply  what  it 
has  been.  It 's  their  mutual  consideration,  all  round, 
that  has  made  it  the  bottomless  gulf;  and  they're 
really  so  embroiled  but  because,  in  their  way,  they  've 
been  so  improbably  good." 

"  In  their  way  —  yes ! "  the  Colonel  grinned. 

"Which  was  above  all  Maggie's  way."  No  flicker 
of  his  ribaldry  was  anything  to  her  now.  "Maggie 
had  in  the  first  place  to  make  up  to  her  father  for  her 
having  suffered  herself  to  become  —  poor  little  dear, 
as  she  believed  —  so  intensely  married.  Then  she  had 
to  make  up  to  her  husband  for  taking  so  much  of  the 
time  they  might  otherwise  have  spent  together  to 
make  this  reparation  to  Mr.  Verver  perfect.  And  her 
way  to  do  this,  precisely,  was  by  allowing  the  Prince 
the  use,  the  enjoyment,  whatever  you  may  call  it,  of 

394 


THE  PRINCE 

Charlotte  to  cheer  his  path  —  by  instalments,  as  it 
were  —  in  proportion  as  she  herself,  making  sure  her 
father  was  all  right,  might  be  missed  from  his  side. 
By  so  much,  at  the  same  time,  however,"  Mrs.  Assing- 
ham  further  explained,  "by  so  much  as  she  took  her 
young  stepmother,  for  this  purpose,  away  from  Mr. 
Verver,  by  just  so  much  did  this  too  strike  her  as 
something  again  to  be  made  up  for.  It  has  saddled 
her,  you  '11  easily  see,  with  a  positively  new  obligation 
to  her  father,  an  obligation  created  and  aggravated 
by  her  unfortunate  even  if  quite  heroic  little  sense 
of  justice.  She  began  with  wanting  to  show  him  that 
his  marriage  could  never,  under  whatever  tempta 
tion  of  her  own  bliss  with  the  Prince,  become  for 
her  a  pretext  for  deserting  or  neglecting  him.  Then 
that,  in  its  order,  entailed  her  wanting  to  show  the 
Prince  that  she  recognised  how  the  other  desire  — 
this  wish  to  remain,  intensely,  the  same  passionate 
little  daughter  she  had  always  been  —  involved  in 
some  degree  and  just  for  the  present,  so  to  speak, 
her  neglecting  and  deserting  him.  I  quite  hold," 
Fanny  with  characteristic  amplitude  parenthesised, 
"  that  a  person  can  mostly  feel  but  one  passion  — 
one  tender  passion,  that  is  —  at  a  time.  Only  that 
does  n't  hold  good  for  our  primary  and  instinctive  at 
tachments,  the  'voice  of  blood,'  such  as  one's  feeling 
for  a  parent  or  a  brother.  Those  may  be  intense  and 
yet  not  prevent  other  intensities  —  as  you  '11  recog 
nise,  my  dear,  when  you  remember  how  I  continued, 
tout  betement,  to  adore  my  mother,  whom  you  did  n't 
adore,  for  years  after  I  had  begun  to  adore  you.  Well, 
Maggie  "  —  she  kept  it  up  —  "  is  in  the  same  situation 

395 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

as  I  was,  plus  complications  from  which  I  was,  thank 
heaven,  exempt:  plus  the  complication  above  all  of 
not  having  in  the  least  begun  with  the  sense  for  com 
plications  that  I  should  have  had.  Before  she  knew  it 
at  any  rate  her  little  scruples  and  her  little  lucidities, 
which  were  really  so  divinely  blind  —  her  feverish 
little  sense  of  justice,  as  I  say  —  had  brought  the  two 
others  together  as  her  grossest  misconduct  could  n't 
have  done.  And  now  she  knows  something  or  other 
has  happened  —  yet  has  n't  heretofore  known  what. 
She  has  only  piled  up  her  remedy,  poor  child  —  some 
thing  that  she  has  earnestly  but  confusedly  seen  as 
her  necessary  policy;  piled  it  on  top  of  the  policy, 
on  top  of  the  remedy,  that  she  at  first  thought  out 
for  herself  and  that  would  really  have  needed  since 
then  so  much  modification.  Her  only  modification 
has  been  the  growth  of  her  necessity  to  prevent  her 
father's  wondering  if  all,  in  their  life  in  common, 
may  be  so  certainly  for  the  best.  She  has  now  as 
never  before  to  keep  him  unconscious  that,  peculiar, 
if  he  makes  a  point  of  it,  as  their  situation  is,  there 's 
anything  in  it  all  uncomfortable  or  disagreeable, 
anything  morally  the  least  out  of  the  way.  She  has  to 
keep  touching  it  up  to  make  it,  each  day,  each  month, 
look  natural  and  normal  to  him ;  so  that  —  God  for 
give  me  the  comparison !  —  she 's  like  an  old  woman 
who  has  taken  to  'painting'  and  who  has  to  lay  it  on 
thicker,  to  carry  it  off  with  a  greater  audacity,  with 
a  greater  impudence  even,  the  older  she  grows."  And 
Fanny  stood  a  moment  captivated  with  the  image  she 
had  thrown  off.  "  I  like  the  idea  of  Maggie  audacious 
and  impudent  —  learning  to  be  so  to  gloss  things  over. 

396 


THE   PRINCE 

She  could  —  she  even  will,  yet,  I  believe  —  learn  it, 
for  that  sacred  purpose,  consummately,  diabolically. 
For  from  the  moment  the  dear  man  should  see  it's 
all  rouge — !"  She  paused,  staring  at  the  vision. 

It  imparted  itself  even  to  Bob.  "Then  the  fun 
would  begin  ? "  As  it  but  made  her  look  at  him  hard, 
however,  he  amended  the  form  of  his  enquiry.  "You 
mean  that  in  that  case  she  will,  charming  creature,  be 
lost?" 

She  was  silent  a  moment  more.  "As  I  've  told  you 
before,  she  won't  be  lost  if  her  father's  saved.  She'll 
see  that  as  salvation  enough." 

The  Colonel  took  it  in.  "  Then  she 's  a  little  hero 
ine." 

"Rather  —  she's  a  little  heroine.  But  it's  his  in 
nocence,  above  all,"  Mrs.  Assingham  added,  "that 
will  pull  them  through." 

Her  companion,  at  this,  focussed  again  Mr.  Verver's 
innocence.  "It's  awfully  quaint." 

"Of  course  it's  awfully  quaint!  That  it's  awfully 
quaint,  that  the  pair  are  awfully  quaint,  quaint  with 
all  our  dear  old  quaintness  —  by  which  I  don't  mean 
yours  and  mine,  but  that  of  my  own  sweet  country- 
people,  from  whom  I've  so  deplorably  degenerated  — 
that,"  Mrs.  Assingham  declared,  "was  originally  the 
head  and  front  of  their  appeal  to  me  and  of  my  inter 
est  in  them.  And  of  course  I  shall  feel  them  quainter 
still,"  she  rather  ruefully  subjoined,  "before  they've 
done  with  me! " 

This  might  be,  but  it  was  n't  what  most  stood  in 
the  Colonel's  way.  "  You  believe  so  in  Mr.  Verver's 
innocence  after  two  years  of  Charlotte  ? " 

397 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

She  stared.  "But  the  whole  point  is  just  that  two 
years  of  Charlotte  are  what  he  has  n't  really  —  or 
what  you  may  call  undividedly  —  had." 

"Any  more  than  Maggie  by  your  theory,  eh,  has 
*  really  or  undividedly,'  had  four  of  the  Prince  ?  It 
takes  all  she  has  n't  had,"  the  Colonel  conceded,  "to 
account  for  the  innocence  that  in  her  too  so  leaves  us 
in  admiration." 

So  far  as  it  might  be  ribald  again  she  let  this  pass. 
"  It  takes  a  great  many  things  to  account  for  Maggie. 
What 's  definite  at  all  events  is  that  —  strange  though 
this  be  —  her  effort  for  her  father  has  up  to  now  suffi 
ciently  succeeded.  She  has  made  him,  she  makes  him, 
accept  the  tolerably  obvious  oddity  of  their  relation, 
all  round,  for  part  of  the  game.  Behind  her  there,  pro 
tected  and  amused  and,  as  it  were,  exquisitely  hum 
bugged  —  the  Principino,  in  whom  he  delights,  al 
ways  aiding — he  has  safely  and  serenely  enough 
suffered  the  conditions  of  his  life  to  pass  for  those  he 
had  sublimely  projected.  He  had  n't  worked  them 
out  in  detail  —  any  more  than  I  had,  heaven  pity  me ! 
—  and  the  queerness  has  been  exactly  in  the  detail. 
This,  for  him,  is  what  it  was  to  have  married  Char 
lotte.  And  they  both,"  she  neatly  wound  up,  "help." 

"'Both'  —  ?" 

"I  mean  that  if  Maggie,  always  in  the  breach, 
makes  it  seem  to  him  all  so  flourishingly  to  fit,  Char 
lotte  does  her  part  not  less.  And  her  part  is  very  large. 
Charlotte,"  Fanny  declared,  "works  like  a  horse." 

So  there  it  all  was,  and  her  husband  looked  at  her 
a  minute  across  it.  "And  what  does  the  Prince  work 
like?" 

398 


THE   PRINCE 

She  fixed  him  in  return.  "  Like  a  Prince ! "  Where 
upon,  breaking  short  off  to  ascend  to  her  room,  she 
presented  her  highly-decorated  back  —  in  which,  in 
odd  places,  controlling  the  complications  of  its  aspect, 
the  ruby  or  the  garnet,  the  turquoise  and  the  topaz, 
gleamed  like  faint  symbols  of  the  wit  that  pinned 
together  the  satin  patches  of  her  argument. 

He  watched  her  as  if  she  left  him  positively  under 
the  impression  of  her  mastery  of  her  subject;  yes,  as 
if  the  real  upshot  of  the  drama  before  them  was  but 
that  he  had,  when  it  came  to  the  tight  places  of  life 

—  as  life  had  shrunk  for  him  now — the  most  luminous 
of  wives.    He  turned  off,  in  this  view  of  her  majestic 
retreat,  the  comparatively  faint  little  electric  lamp 
that  had  presided  over  their  talk;  then  he  went  up  as 
immediately  behind  her  as  the  billows  of  her  amber 
train  allowed,  making  out  how  all  the  clearness  they 
had  conquered  was  even  for  herself  a  relief —  how  at 
last  the  sense  of  the  amplitude  of  her  exposition  sus 
tained  and  floated  her.    Joining  her  however  on  the 
landing  above,  where  she  had  already  touched  a  metal 
lic  point  into  light,  he  found  she  had  done  perhaps 
even  more  to  create  than  to  extinguish  in  him  the 
germ  of  a  curiosity.    He  held  her  a  minute  longer 

—  there  was  another  plum  in  the  pie.    "  What  did 
you  mean  some  minutes  ago  by  his  not  caring  for 
Charlotte?" 

"The  Prince's?  By  his  not  ' really '  caring ?"  She 
recalled,  after  a  little,  benevolently  enough.  "I  mean 
that  men  don't,  when  it  has  all  been  too  easy.  That 's 
how,  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten,  a  woman  is  treated  who 
has  risked  her  life.  You  asked  me  just  now  how  he 

399 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

works,"  she  added;  "but  you  might  better  perhaps 
have  asked  me  how  he  plays." 

Well,  he  made  it  up.  "Like  a  Prince?" 
"Like  a  Prince.  He  is  profoundly  a  Prince.  For 
that,"  she  said  with  expression,  "he 's  —  beautifully  — 
a  case.  They  're  far  rarer,  even  in  the  '  highest  circles,' 
than  they  pretend  to  be  —  and  that 's  what  makes  so 
much  of  his  value.  He 's  perhaps  one  of  the  very  last 

—  the  last  of  the  real  ones.  So  it  is  we  must  take  him. 
We  must  take  him  all  round." 

The  Colonel  considered.  "And  how  must  Char 
lotte  —  if  anything  happens  —  take  him  ? " 

The  question  held  her  a  minute,  and  while  she 
waited  with  her  eyes  on  him  she  put  out  a  grasping 
hand  to  his  arm,  in  the  flesh  of  which  he  felt  her 
answer  distinctly  enough  registered.  Thus  she  gave 
him,  standing  off  a  little,  the  firmest  longest  deepest 
injunction  he  had  ever  received  from  her.  "Nothing 

—  in  spite  of  everything  —  will  happen.  Nothing  has 
happened.   Nothing  is  happening." 

He  looked  a  trifle  disappointed.    "I  see.   For  us" 

"For  us.  For  whom  else?"  And  he  was  to  feel 
indeed  how  she  wished  him  to  understand  it.  "We 
know  nothing  on  earth  — ! "  It  was  an  undertaking  he 
must  sign. 

So  he  wrote,  as  it  were,  his  name.  "We  know  no 
thing  on  earth."  It  was  like  the  soldiers'  watchword 
at  night. 

"We  're  as  innocent,"  she  went  on  in  the  same  way, 
"as  babes." 

"Why  not  rather  say,"  he  asked,  "as  innocent  as 
they  themselves  are  ? " 

400 


THE   PRINCE 

"Ah  for  the  best  of  reasons!  Because  we're  much 
more  so." 

He  wondered.    "  But  how  can  we  be  more  —  ? " 

"For  them?   Oh  easily!   We  can  be  anything." 

"Absolute  idiots  then?" 

"Absolute  idiots.  And  oh,"  Fanny  breathed,  "the 
way  it  will  rest  us ! " 

Well,  he  looked  as  if  there  were  something  in  that. 
"  But  won't  they  know  we  're  not  ? " 

She  barely  hesitated.  "Charlotte  and  the  Prince 
think  we  are  —  which  is  so  much  gained.  Mr.  Verver 
believes  in  our  intelligence  —  but  he  does  n't  matter." 

"And  Maggie  ?   Does  n't  she  know  —  ? " 

"That  we  see  before  our  noses  ?"  Yes,  this  indeed 
took  longer.  "Oh  so  far  as  she  may  guess  it  she'll 
give  no  sign.  So  it  comes  to  the  same  thing." 

He  raised  his  eyebrows.  "Comes  to  our  not  being 
able  to  help  her  ? " 

"That's  the  way  we  shall  help  her." 

"By  looking  like  fools?" 

She  threw  up  her  hands.  "She  only  wants,  herself, 
to  look  like  a  bigger !  So  there  we  are ! "  With  which 
she  brushed  it  away  —  his  conformity  was  promised. 
Something  nevertheless  still  held  her;  it  broke,  to 
her  own  vision,  as  a  last  wave  of  clearness.  "More 
over  now,"  she  said,  "I  see!  I  mean,"  she  added, 
"what  you  were  asking  me:  how  I  knew  to-day  in 
Eaton  Square  that  Maggie's  awake."  And  she  had 
indeed  visibly  got  it.  "It  was  by  seeing  them  to 
gether." 

"  Seeing  her  with  her  father  ? "  He  fell  behind 
again.  "But  you've  seen  her  often  enough  before." 

401 


THE  GOLDEN  BOWL 

"Never  with  my  present  eyes.  For  nothing  like 
such  a  test  —  that  of  this  length  of  the  others'  ab 
sence  together  —  has  hitherto  occurred." 

"  Possibly !  But  if  she  and  Mr.  Verver  insisted  upon 
it  —  ?" 

"  Whv  is  it  such  a  test  ?   Because  it  has  become  one 

j 

without  their  intending  it.  It  has  spoiled,  so  to  speak, 
on  their  hands." 

"It  has  soured,  eh  ?"  the  Colonel  said. 

"The  word's  horrible  —  say  rather  it  has 
'changed.'  Perhaps,"  Fanny  went  on,  "she  did  wish 
to  see  how  much  she  can  bear.  In  that  case  she  has 
seen.  Only  it  was  she  alone  who  —  about  the  visit  — 
insisted.  Her  father  insists  on  nothing.  And  she 
watches  him  do  it." 

Her  husband  looked  impressed.   "Watches  him  ?" 

"For  the  first  faint  sign.  I  mean  of  his  noticing. 
It  does  n't,  as  I  tell  you,  come.  But  she 's  there  for  it 
—  to  see.  And  I  felt,"  she  continued,  "how  she's 
there;  I  caught  her,  as  it  were,  in  the  fact.  She 
could  n't  keep  it  from  me —  though  she  left  her  post 
on  purpose :  came  home  with  me  to  throw  dust  in  my 
eyes.  I  took  it  all  —  her  dust;  but  it  was  what  showed 
me."  With  which  supreme  lucidity  she  reached  the 
door  of  her  room.  "Luckily  it  showed  me  also  how 
she  has  succeeded.  Nothing  —  from  him  —  has 
come." 

"You're  so  awfully  sure?" 

"Sure.  Nothing  will.  Good-night,"  she  said. 
"She '11  die  first." 


END    OF    VOLUME    I 


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